Lévy flights for light in ordered lasers

Abstract

Lévy flights for light have been demonstrated in disordered systems with and without optical gain, and remained unobserved in ordered ones. In the present letter, we investigate, numerically and experimentally, Lévy flights for light in ordered systems due to an ordered (conventional) laser. The statistical analysis was performed on the intensity fluctuations of the output spectra upon repeated identical experimental realizations. We found out that the optical gain and the mirrors reflectivity are critical parameters governing the fluctuation statistics. We identified Lévy regimes for gain around the laser threshold, and Gaussian-Lévy-Gaussian crossovers were unveiling when increasing the gain from below to above the threshold. The experimental results were corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations, and the fluctuations were associated to a Langevin noise source that takes into account the randomness of the spontaneous emission, which seeds the laser emission and can cause large fluctuations of the output spectra from shot-to-shot under identical experimental realizations.

References in corpus (13)

• Instabilities, breathers and rogue waves in optics
• Random lasers, Lévy statistics and spin glasses: Synergy between photonics and complex systems
• Suppressing spatio-temporal lasing instabilities with wave-chaotic microcavities
• Statistical regimes of random laser fluctuations
• Glassy behavior of light
• Turbulence Hierarchy in a Random Fibre Laser
• Intrinsic fluctuations in random lasers
• General phase-diagram of multimodal ordered and disordered lasers in closed and open cavities
• Experimental and theoretical investigation of statistical regimes in random laser emission
• The glassy random laser: replica symmetry breaking in the intensity fluctuations of emission spectra
• Statistical mechanics models for multimode lasers and random lasers
• Photonic ferromagnetic-like spontaneous mode-locking phase transition with replica symmetry breaking in multimode Nd:YAG laser
• Superdiffusive random laser

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Dissipation-engineered family of nearly dark states in many-body cavity-atom systems
• Delay time of waves performing Lévy walks in 1D random media