Experimental characterization of hopping dynamics in a multistable fiber laser

We demonstrate experimental evidence of noise-induced attractor hopping in a multistable fiber laser. Multistate hopping dynamics displays complex statistical properties characterized by nontrivial scalings. When hopping is encountered between two states, the dynamics of the system is characterized by the -32 power law for the probability distribution of periodic windows versus their length, just as in the case of two-state on-off intermittency. A surprising noise saturation effect is found: average output noise in the hopping regime is almost independent of input noise. Such robustness of the system against external noise may be beneficial for some applications: for example, for communications with multistable systems or for designing noise-insensitive detectors.