The emergence of chaos in a laser irradiated spherical absorber

We show in this paper that the simple system of a spherical absorber immersed in water can exhibit complex and chaotic behavior upon absorption of laser energy. We report on computer experiments performed on this simple system. We present power spectra and calculate Lyapunov exponents that show that for increasing laser pulse durations and increasing laser energy the pressure response of the system changes from periodic to a regime displaying spatiotemporal chaos. This is important from a theoretical point of view because the complex behavior displayed in this simple system makes it an excellent choice for investigations into the nonlinear dynamics of fluids and the complicated transition to turbulence. This is also important for people using these systems for various applications in material science and biomedicine.