Optical rogue waves and soliton turbulence in nonlinear fibre optics

Abstract

There is currently intense research into extreme value fluctuations (optical rogue waves) in long pulse fibre supercontinuum (SC) generation. This paper analysis the dynamics of optical rogue wave formation in terms of the well-known soliton turbulence description in which solitons play the role of statistical attractors in any non-integrable nonlinear Schrodinger equation (NLSE) model. Specifically, we show that Raman scattering is unnecessary for intense rogue pulses to emerge from SC generation, and third-order dispersion on its own is sufficient to stimulate a single large rogue soliton in the long distance limit. An additional novel result is that the rogue soliton undergoes a continuous frequency shift to longer wavelengths with propagation as a result of interaction with the turbulent background, even in the absence of Raman scattering.