Excitable chaotic pulses exhibiting extreme events statistics in an opto-radiofrequency oscillator

We report theoretical and experimental evidence of a new kind of excitability in an opto-radiofrequency oscillator based on a self-injected dual-frequency laser. At variance with previous reports on injected lasers, the excitable pulses are not accompanied by phase slips, and thus cannot be explained by the universal mechanism described by Adler approximation. Another original feature of our system is that the excitable response involves a bifurcation towards a chaotic attractor. Furthermore, we show that this excitability mechanism generates a stochastic process characterized by a non-gaussian statistics, and exhibiting extreme events.