Extreme Events in femtosecond lasers.

ALEJANDRO HNILO.

Buenos Aires

Conferencia; Extreme Events in Complex Optical Systems EECOS 2015.; 2015

Extreme events were early observed in the Kerr-lens-mode-locked, Ti:Sapphire laser. This laser emits pulses of duration in the femtosecond range at a repetition rate about 100 MHz. This system belongs to the "laser + saturable absorber" class of problems, and the spatial (self-focusing) and time (self-phase-modulation) manifestations of the Kerr nonlinearity are essential for its operation.It can also be regarded as an "active" version of the (passive) system where optical rogue waves were observed for the first time. In this talk, the experimental and theoretical results regarding the formation of extreme events in this laser are reviewed. It is remarkable that extreme events are observed in only one of two coexisting chaotic attractors, and that this result is explained by assuming the existence of an instability threshold similar to the modulational instability one in the NLSE.