Abstract
Efforts to understand the physics of rogue waves have motivated the study of mechanisms that produce rare, extreme events, often through analogous optical setups. As many studies have reported nonlinear generation mechanisms, recent work has explored whether optical rogue events can be produced in linear systems. Here we report the observation of linear rogue events with tunable height, generated from light imprinted with a non-Markovian wavefront. Moreover, if the non-Markovian wavefront is allowed to propagate through a nonlinear medium, extraordinarily long-tailed intensity distributions are produced, which do not conform to the statistics previously observed in optical rogue wave experiments.
Highlights
Over the past centuries, rare incidents of unexpected, extraordinarily large oceanic waves have been reported, together with their devastating consequences.[1]
Solli et al observed the generation of optical rogue waves in nonlinear media with modulation instability.[2]
Intensity distributions obeying Rayleigh statistics are generated when a homogeneous wave is Rayleigh scattered by a large number of random scatterers, creating a uniform distribution of phases in the interval [−π, π] in the scattered wave, and the scattered wave is observed at a distance from the scattering layer.[25]
Summary
The efforts to understand the physics of rogue waves have motivated the study of mechanisms that produce rare, extreme events, often through analogous optical setups. As many studies have reported nonlinear generation mechanisms, recent work has explored whether optical rogue events can be produced in linear systems. We report the observation of linear rogue events with tunable height, generated from light imprinted with a non-Markovian wavefront. If the non-Markovian wavefront is allowed to propagate through a nonlinear medium, extraordinarily long-tailed intensity distributions are produced, which do not conform to the statistics previously observed in optical rogue wave experiments
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
