Structured light entities, chaos and nonlocal maps

Spatial chaos as a phenomenon of ultimate complexity requires the efficient numerical algorithms. For this purpose iterative low-dimensional maps have demonstrated high efficiency. Natural generalization of Feigenbaum and Ikeda maps may include convolution integrals with kernel in a form of Green function of a relevant linear physical system. It is shown that such iterative $nonlocal$ $nonlinear$ $maps$ are equivalent to ubiquitous class of nonlinear partial differential equations of Ginzburg-Landau type. With a Green functions relevant to generic optical resonators these $nonlocal$ $maps$ emulate the basic spatiotemporal phenomena as spatial solitons, vortex eigenmodes breathing via relaxation oscillations mediated by noise, vortex-vortex and vortex-antivortex lattices with periodic location of vortex cores. The smooth multimode noise addition facilitates the selection of stable entities and elimination of numerical artifacts.