The statistics of chaos in a bursting laser

Abstract: We demonstrate experimentally how semiconductor lasers subjected to double optical feedback change the statistics of their chaotic spiking dynamics from Gaussian to long-tail Power Law distributions associated to the emergency of bursting. These chaotic regimes, which are features of excitable complex systems, are quantified by the tail exponent $\alpha$ and appear by changing the ratio between the feedback times. Transitions to bursting occur in the neighbourhood of low order Farey fractions. The physics behind these transitions is related to the variation of threshold pump current in the compound system as obtained from a deterministic set of rate equations. Numerical integration also verifies the observed chaos transitions indicating the possibility of controlling the bursting chaotic statistics.