Rogue waves in laser systems

M. GIUDICI, M. KOVALSKY, ALEJANDRO HNILO, C. MASOLLER, J. RIOS LEITE , J.R. TREDICCE

Estambul.

Workshop; Nonlinear Guided Waves V; 2011

The appearance of rogue or freak waves, that are extremely large pulses, is well known in oceanographic and atmospheric sciences. Here we show that rogue waves appear also in very simple laser systems: mode-locked lasers, laser with injected signal and laser with saturable absorber. We report both experimental and theoretical results of the amplitude probability distribution. We compare different dynamical states with and without the presence of noise. We show that rogue waves appear always in a chaotic regime on these systems which is an evidence of the deterministic origin of rogue waves at least in the kind of systems we considered. Our results open the way to very simple experiments demonstrating the appearance of rogue waves in a large variety of nonlinear dynamical systems. Finally we discuss the connection of the statistics of rogue waves with that of the well known Levy Flights.