Observation and Manipulation of Self‐Chaos in Disordered Optical System

Abstract Optical chaos is an attractive topic due to its unique dynamics and has been widely investigated in external‐cavity lasers. While chaotic behavior is hindered by undesired periodicity from external feedback. Although a self‐chaotic micro‐laser based on nonlinear interaction of internal modes can eliminate the periodicity, the inevitable characteristic frequency related to well‐defined cavity limits the improvement of chaotic performance. By virtue of the inherent randomness, disordered optical system can naturally avoid characteristic frequency and is deemed an ideal platform for generating self‐chaos. Here, the dynamical evolution process of self‐chaos in disordered optical system is observed, and self‐chaotic behavior can be flexibly manipulated by altering the interaction strength among random modes. Simultaneously, by adopting Erbium‐Raman hybrid gain, chaotic bandwidth can be synergistically enhanced to 38 GHz, which is successfully employed for higher‐speed true random bits generation and a scheme of local information encryption with higher‐quality. This work paves the way for investigating complex chaotic dynamics in disordered systems and showcases great potentialities within information security applications.