Quasiperiodic route to chaos in the Kerr-lens mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser -: art. no. 063803

We have performed an experimental study of the nonlinear dynamics in a Kerr-lens mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser producing approximate to 25 fs pulses. Grassberger-Procaccia and false nearest-neighbor analyses indicate that the pulse trains follow a quasiperiodic route to low-dimensional chaos. The experimental results agree quite well with a simulation based on the Gaussian four-by-four matrix formalism. Pulse-resolved measurements show that the instability in pulse energy is associated with instabilities in the pulse spectral and spatial profile.