A novel approach is presented for the reconstruction of phase synchronization phenomena in a chaotic CO2laser from experimental data. We analyze this laser system in a regime of homoclinic chaos, which is able to phase synchronize with a weak sinusoidal forcing. Our technique recovers the synchronization diagram of the experimental system from only few measurement data sets, thus allowing the prediction of the regime of phase synchronization as well as non‐synchronization in a broad parameter space of forcing frequency and amplitude without further experiments. © 2004 American Institute of Physics