Arrest of Domain Coarsening via Antiperiodic Regimes in Delay Systems

Motionless domain walls representing connecting temporal or spatial orbits typically exist only for very specific parameters, around the so-called Maxwell point. This report introduces a novel mechanism for stabilizing temporal domain walls away from this peculiar equilibrium, opening up new possibilities to encode information in dynamical systems. It is based on antiperiodic regimes in a delayed system close to a bistable situation, leading to a cancellation of the average drift velocity. The results are demonstrated in a normal form model and experimentally in a laser with optical injection and delayed feedback.