  Application of Karhunen-Loeve decomposition (KLD, or singular value
decomposition) is presented for analysis of the spatio-temporal dynamics of
wide-aperture vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL), considered as a
thin-layer system. KLD technique enables to extract a set of dominant
components from complex dynamics of system under study and separate them from
noise and inessential underlying dynamical behavior. Properties of KLD spectrum
and structure of its main components are studied for different regimes of
VCSEL. Along with the analysis of VCSEL, a brief survey of KLD method and its
usage for theoretical and experimental description of nonlinear dynamical
systems is presented.

Optics;Chaotic Dynamics;Computational Physics