Experimental Evidence of Stochastic Resonance in an Excitable Optical System

Experimental evidence of stochastic resonance in an excitable optical system is reported. We apply a sinusoidal forcing to the system and, for a finite external noise level, we find a frequency for which the excitable pulsing occurs periodically at the frequency imposed by the modulation. This resonant frequency matches the inverse of the average escape time of the stochastically driven system (i.e., without forcing). The same resonance is found by varying the noise level for fixed forcing frequencies. We discuss different indicators in order to describe quantitatively the degree of resonance.