Optical Solitons and Frequency Comb Generation - Abstract

Tissoni, Giovanna

Spatiotemporal extreme events in spatially extended lasers

In the last decades, extreme events have been under study in many different physical systems, from hydrodynamics to optics, where they have been identified as optical rogue waves. Here we present some recent results about extreme events in spatially extended laser systems with different geometries and configurations, spanning from broad area semiconductor microlasers (2D) with saturable absorber or coherent injection, to macroscopic ring semiconductor lasers (1D) with coherent injection. In all of them we can identify regimes where the light emitted shows huge intensity peaks. We study the statistics of these peaks and shed some light on their possible generating mechanisms. Strong similarities with different types of dissipative solitons (cavity solitons, phase solitons) are also enlightened.