Chaotic itinerancy in a coupled-element multistable optical chain

Self-induced wandering among local attractors, that is, chaotic itinerancy, and the chaotic search of coexisting periodic or chaotic local orbits have been discovered in a nonequilibrium optical system with distributed nonlinear elements (Otsuka-Ikeda model system). It is shown on the basis of numerical simulations that spatiotemporal chaos in this system is interpreted as unstable motions which dynamically connect destabilized spatial structures via a chaotic itinerancy process.