6 - Peregrine soliton dynamics and optical rogue waves

Abstract

Over half a century, the field of nonlinear photonics has grown enormously and demonstrated many intriguing nonlinear optical wave phenomena, such as solitons, breathers, optical vortices, strange attractors, self-similar pulses, and rogue waves. In this Chapter 6, we will confine our discussions on the subject of “rogue waves”, given that the soliton issues have been much touched upon elsewhere. In fact, it was not until the recent decade that the field of optical rogue waves in general began to flourish, activated by the milestone observation of optical equivalents of oceanic rogue waves in a microstructured optical fiber in 2007. Here we first discuss, in a systematical manner, the singular chirped rogue wave dynamics occurring in optical fibers, modeled by a generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation. Then we demonstrate both analytically and numerically the universal emergence of unusual fundamental Peregrine solitons, which can exhibit an unprecedentedly ultrahigh peak amplitude, in a vector Kaup–Newell system enabled by a type II highly phase-mismatched second-harmonic generation process. At last, we present a brief discussion of the fundamental Peregrine solitons developed on the periodic backgrounds based on the SU(2) group transformation theory. We conclude this chapter with a short overview of the experimental progress on optical rogue waves.