Forecasting the chaotic dynamics of external cavity semiconductor lasers.

Chaotic time series prediction has been paid intense attention in recent years due to its important applications. Herein, we present a single-node photonic reservoir computing approach to forecasting the chaotic behavior of external cavity semiconductor lasers using only observed data. In the reservoir, we employ a semiconductor laser with delay as the sole nonlinear physical node. By investigating the effect of the reservoir meta-parameters on the prediction performance, we numerically demonstrate that there exists an optimal meta-parameter space for forecasting optical-feedback-induced chaos. Simulation results demonstrate that using our method, the upcoming chaotic time series can be continuously predicted for a time period in excess of 2 ns with a normalized mean squared error lower than 0.1. This proposed method only utilizes simple nonlinear semiconductor lasers and thus offers a hardware-friendly approach for complex chaos prediction. In addition, this work may provide a roadmap for the meta-parameter selection of a delay-based photonic reservoir to obtain optimal prediction performance.