Dynamic instabilities of microwaves generated with optoelectronic oscillators

We introduce a time-domain model to study the dynamics of optoelectronic oscillators. We show that, due to the interaction between nonlinearity and time delay, the envelope amplitude of ultrapure microwaves generated by optoelectronic oscillators can turn unstable when the gain is increased beyond a given critical value. Our analytical predictions are confirmed by numerical simulations and experiments.