Optical Dark Rogue Wave.

Benoit Frisquet,Philippe Morin,Guy Millot,Matteo Conforti,Bertrand Kibler,Stefan Wabnitz,Fabio Baronio

doi:10.1038/srep20785

Abstract

Photonics enables to develop simple lab experiments that mimic water rogue wave generation phenomena, as well as relativistic gravitational effects such as event horizons, gravitational lensing and Hawking radiation. The basis for analog gravity experiments is light propagation through an effective moving medium obtained via the nonlinear response of the material. So far, analogue gravity kinematics was reproduced in scalar optical wave propagation test models. Multimode and spatiotemporal nonlinear interactions exhibit a rich spectrum of excitations, which may substantially expand the range of rogue wave phenomena, and lead to novel space-time analogies, for example with multi-particle interactions. By injecting two colliding and modulated pumps with orthogonal states of polarization in a randomly birefringent telecommunication optical fiber, we provide the first experimental demonstration of an optical dark rogue wave. We also introduce the concept of multi-component analog gravity, whereby localized spatiotemporal horizons are associated with the dark rogue wave solution of the two-component nonlinear Schrödinger system.

Highlights

Photonics enables to develop simple lab experiments that mimic water rogue wave generation phenomena, as well as relativistic gravitational effects such as event horizons, gravitational lensing and Hawking radiation
When the modulating signal is present, the nonlinear reshaping of the counter-propagating polarizations leads to the generation of a time periodic train of black intensity notches, as shown in the numerical intensity plots of Fig. 5a,b
By using standard telecom components, we have been able to provide the first experimental observation of an optical dark rogue wave, that is, a spatio-temporal localized hole of light that becomes nearly black at its middle

Summary

Introduction

Photonics enables to develop simple lab experiments that mimic water rogue wave generation phenomena, as well as relativistic gravitational effects such as event horizons, gravitational lensing and Hawking radiation. As a matter of fact, scientists who examined satellite images of the Agulhas current in the Indian Ocean recently revealed the formation of “eddies”, or transient coherent whirlpools that remain intact for months[2] These rogue waves have been renamed as oceanic black holes, since they represent the black holes of turbulence: they are fully analog to photonic gravitational black holes[2]. A high-power femtosecond optical pulse was previously launched in the anomalous dispersion regime of a photonic crystal fiber to form an optical soliton[10] Such pulse generated, via cross-phase modulation (XPM), a time-varying refractive index shift, providing an effective moving medium for the propagation of a frequency tunable quasi-continuous wave (cw) probe that was injected at a widely different wavelength in the normal dispersion regime of the fiber. The collision between optical solitons and dispersive waves at event horizons has been recently proposed as a possible mechanism for the generation of rogue wave events[16,17]

Methods

Results

Conclusion