High-dimension chaotic attractors of a nonlinear ring cavity.

The route to chaos found from the delay-differential rate equations is basically different from the subharmonic cascade which is generic of the adiabatic-following-approximation equation. The Lyapunov dimension of each chaotic attractor is found to increase linearly with yrR, the ratio of the delay time to the medium lifetime. This clearly shows the invalidity of the difference-equation mapping whose dimension never exceeds 2.