Waves, Solitons and Turbulence in Optical Systems - Abstract
Rimoldi, Cristina
Spatio-temporal extreme events in a laser with saturable absorber Cristina Rimoldi 1, Franco Prati 2, Stéphane Barland 1, Giovanna Tissoni 1 1. Institut Non Linéaire de Nice, Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis - CNRS, Nice, France 2. Dipartimento di Scienza e Alta Tecnologia, Università dell'Insubria, Como, Italy Extreme events in optics have been recently attracting a great attention [1,2] due to the well-known analogy between optics and hydrodynamics, where rogue waves formation and prediction is a priority field of investigations. In this contribution, we show numerical results about extreme events occurring in the field emitted by a monolithic broad-area semiconductor laser with saturable absorber [3], as the one used in experiments [4]. At difference from previous literature about optical rogue waves in transverse spatial systems [5-7], we developed a numerical method for the individuation of the spatio-temporal maxima of the transverse field intensity. Each maximum appearing in the space profile is followed during its time evolution, and an "event" is counted only when its peak intensity reaches the maximum value also in time. This method allows a comparison, for example, with the hydrodynamical definition of ßignificant wave height", corresponding to the mean value of the wave height (from trough to crest) of the highest third of the waves. Typical FWHM of extreme events in our system is 6 μm in space and 16 ps in time. As suggested in [8] for a similar system, we believe that two dimensional spatial effects play a crucial role in the formation of extreme events. We also strongly believe that our system, being intrinsically two-dimensional, may give some precious insights on the focusing mechanisms giving rise to rogue wave formation in oceans, which can be absent in one-dimensional systems. References [1] D. R. Solli, C. Ropers, P. Koonath, and B. Jalali, Nature 450, 1054–1057 (2007). [2] J. M. Dudley, M. Erkintalo, and Goery Genty, Nat. Photon. 8, 755–764 (2014). [3] H. Vahed, F. Prati, M. Turconi, S. Barland, and G. Tissoni, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 372 20140016 (1-12) (2014). [4] T. Elsass, K. Gauthron, G. Beaudoin, I. Sagnes, R. Kuszelewicz, and S. Barbay, Eur. Phys. J. D 59, 91–96 (2010). [5] F. T. Arecchi, U. Bortolozzo, A. Montina, and S. Residori. Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 15390(1-4) (2011). [6] G.-L. Oppo, A. M. Yao, and D. Cuozzo, Phys. Rev. A 88, 0438131-4 (2013). [7] C. Liu, R. E. C. van der Wel, N. Rotenberg, L. Kuipers, T. F. Krauss, A. Di Falco, and A. Fratalocchi. Nat. Phys. 11, 358–363 (2015). [8] C. Bonazzola, A. Hnilo, M. Kovalsky, and J. R. Tredicce, Journal of Optics 15, 064004(1-6) (2013).