Stationary, harmonic, and pulsed operations of an optically bistable laser with saturable absorber. II

Abstract

In the preceding paper we have analyzed the bifurcation diagram of the steady and time-periodic solutions of the lasers with saturable absorbers (LSA) equations. However, a study of the experimental results presented in the literature indicates that, in general, the control parameter is a slowly varying function of time. In this second paper we analyze the influence of this time dependence on the bifurcation diagram of the LSA. We show that the stability changes of the slowly varying steady-state solutions do not correspond to their bifurcation or limit points in the case where all parameters are constant. In particular, we show that the zero-intensity state can be stabilized during a certain interval of time and that this stabilization can be controlled by the initial value of the time-dependent bifurcation parameter.