  Although deterministic chaos has been predicted to occur in the triply
resonant optical parametric oscillator (TROPO) fifteen years ago, experimental
evidence of chaotic behavior in this system has been lacking so far, in marked
contrast with most nonlinear systems, where chaos has been actively tracked and
found. This situation is probably linked to the high sensitivity of the TROPO
to perturbations, which adversely affects stationary operation at high power.
We report the experimental observation in this system of a burst of irregular
behavior of duration 80 microseconds. Although the system is highly
nonstationary over this time interval, a topological analysis allows us to
extract a clearcut signature of deterministic chaos from a time series segment
of only 9 base cycles (3 microseconds). This result suggests that
nonstationarity is not necessarily an obstacle to the characterization of
chaos.
