| What is laminar chaos and how does one observe it experimentally? We look at chaos in feedback systems with time delay and find that a new kind of chaotic dynamics was recently predicted to exist when the time delay is variable. Laminar chaos is a low-dimensional dynamics characterized by laminar phases of nearly constant intensity with periodic durations and a chaotic variation of the intensity from one laminar phase to the next laminar phase. This is in stark contrast to the typically observed higher-dimensional turbulent chaos, which is characterized by strong fluctuations. The results show that laminar chaos can be observed in the laboratory, and that the phenomenon is robust to noise and a digital implementation of the variable time delay. |