Extreme events in the dynamical behaviour of a Nd:YVO4 laser with modulated losses: experimental approach

A. LACAPMESURE; N. MIRON GRANESE; M. AGÛERO; M. KOVALSKY; J. TREDICCE; A. HNILO

C.A.B.A.

Workshop; XVII Giambiagi Winter School: Light and Light-based Technologies; 2015

Departamento de Física FCEN UBA

Since optical rogue waves (ORWs) were first reported in 2007, the study of extreme events in optical systems has been a very active research field. In such systems, extreme events appear as high intensity pulses in the chaotic behavior, giving a long tail in the probability distribution of the intensity of the pulses. Understanding the dynamics in which extreme events arise comprises the first step toward the prediction and control of these pulses. In this work, we study thedynamics of an all-solid-state Nd:YVO4 laser (class B) with electro-optically modulated losses. Taking the amplitude modulation as the adjustable control parameter Vmod, we analyze the temporal series for the maxima of intensity pulses.At low values of Vmod the intensity traces obtained were periodic, showing a monotonically increasing period, hysteresis and bistability. After reaching athreshold the system goes into a low-dimensional chaotic behavior, in which the probability distribution of the temporal series presents a non-Gaussian shape.Extreme events arise as events in the long tail of the distribution at high amplitude values, exhibiting a nonlinear dependence of their occurrence with the control parameter. These results are in good qualitative agreement with the existence of an ?external crisis?, as recent theoretical model predicts. Furthermore,we observe that the predictability horizon of the dynamics associated when extreme events occur is larger than the one associated to a regular pulse. Therefore, we hypothesize the existence of structures within the chaotic behavior in which the systems becomes more predictable.