We present experiments giving evidence for the onset of irregular spatio-temporal dynamics on picosecond timescales in broad area lasers and characterize the dynamical complexity. In particular, we present single shot streak camera measurements of the nearfield dynamics of a broad area laser with a 100 m wide active area and successfully apply Karhunen--Loeve Decomposition (KLD) directly to the experimental data. Only a limited number of KLD modes is necessary to recover all essential features of the dynamical behavior. This fact allows the estimation of the system's number of degrees of freedom. c # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved 1. INTRODUCTION Broad area lasers are technologically very important devices. Their high optical output power makes them interesting for many applications, e.g. in telecommunication, manufacturing, pumping of solid state lasers and of fiber amplifiers. However, their applicability is restricted to conditions where good beam quality a...
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Burkhard et al. (1999) studied this question.