混沌激光作为激光器输出不稳定性的一种特殊形式，具有类噪声宽频谱的特性。近年来，随着人们对混沌激光特性的掌握和控制，混沌激光应用受到了研究者们的广泛关注。结合国内外研究现状，阐述了混沌激光在高速真随机密钥产生、混沌保密通信和混沌密钥分发、混沌激光雷达和混沌光时域反射仪、混沌超宽带脉冲(UWB)信号产生、相干长度可调谐光源以及混沌计算方面应用的研究热点、研究进展以及未来发展方向。

Chaotic laser, viewed as a special form of laser outputs, has noise-like timeseries and wide frequency spectrum bandwidth. In recent years, the application of chaotic laser has attracted the wide attentions as the characteristics of chaos laser are being understood and controlled. Combined with the research situation，the current hot spots and the research progresses of the chaotic laser applications are riviewed in the fields of high-speed random bit sequence generation, chaos secure communication and chaos key distribution,chaotic laser ladar and chaotic optical time domain reflectometer, ultrawideband pulse signal generator, laser source with tunable coherence length and chaos computing. Furthermore, some possible development orientations in the future are pointed out.