Characterizing the Hyperchaotic Dynamics of a Semiconductor Laser Subject to Optical Feedback Via Permutation Entropy

The time evolution of the output of a semiconductor laser subject to delayed optical feedback can exhibit high-dimensional chaotic fluctuations. In this contribution, our aim is to quantify the degree of unpredictability of this hyperchaotic time evolution. To that end, we estimate permutation entropy, a novel information-theory-derived quantifier particularly robust in a noisy environment. The permutation entropy is defined as a functional of a symbolic probability distribution, evaluated using the Bandt-Pompe recipe to assign a probability distribution function to the time series generated by the chaotic system. This measure quantifies the diversity of orderings present in the associated time series. In order to evaluate the performance of this novel quantifier, we compare with the results obtained by using a more standard chaos quantifier, namely the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy. Here, we present numerical results showing that the permutation entropy, evaluated at specific time-scales involved in the chaotic regime of the semiconductor laser subject to optical feedback, give valuable information about the degree of unpredictability of the chaotic laser dynamics. The influence of additive observational noise on the proposed tool is also investigated.