Fighting chaos with chaos in lasers

For many laser applications, beam stability is critical, but chaotic lasing dynamics can create spatiotemporal instabilities. A long-standing problem in high-power semiconductor lasers (1, 2) is that instabilities can arise from deterministic and random effects that control the complex interactions between the radiation field and matter. The conventional approach to suppress instabilities is to reduce the level of complexity of the system. On page 1225 of this issue, Bittner et al. (3) now report a counterintuitive method that introduces an additional layer of complexity, chaotic ray dynamics, to mitigate chaos in lasing dynamics—a strategy similar to “fighting fire with fire.”