Neurons communicate by brief bursts of spikes separated by silent phases and information may be encoded into the burst duration or through the structure of the interspike intervals. Inspired by the importance of bursting activities in neuronal computation, we have investigated the bursting oscillations of an optically injected quantum dot laser. We find experimentally that the laser periodically switches between two distinct operating states with distinct optical frequencies exhibiting either fast oscillatory or nearly steady state evolutions (two-color bursting oscillations). The conditions for their emergence and their control are analyzed by systematic simulations of the laser rate equations. By projecting the bursting solution onto the bifurcation diagram of a fast subsystem, we show how a specific hysteresis phenomenon explains the transitions between active and silent phases. Since size-controlled bursts can contain more information content than single spikes our results open the way to new forms of neuron inspired optical communication.
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