Optical Rogue Waves in integrable turbulence

Abstract

We report optical fiber experiments allowing to investigate integrable turbulence in the focusing regime of the one dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation (1D-NLSE). Our experiments are very similar in their principle to water tank experiments with random initial conditions (see M. Onorato {\it et al.} Phys. Rev. E {\bf 70} 067302 (2004)). Using an original optical sampling setup, we measure precisely the probability density function (PDF) of optical power of partially coherent waves rapidly fluctuating with time. The PDF is found to evolve from the normal law to a strong heavy-tailed distribution, thus revealing the formation of rogue waves in integrable turbulence. Numerical simulations of 1D-NLSE with stochastic initial conditions reproduce quantitatively the experiments. Our investigations suggest that the statistical features experimentally observed rely on the stochastic generation of coherent analytic solutions of 1D-NLSE such as Peregrine solitons.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Instabilities, breathers and rogue waves in optics
• Non-Gaussian statistics and extreme waves in a nonlinear optical cavity
• Real-time full bandwidth measurement of spectral noise in supercontinuum generation
• Nonlinear propagation of an optical speckle field
• Soliton-based discriminator of non-coherent optical pulses