Spatio-temporal extreme events in a laser with saturable absorber

Abstract

Extreme events in optics have been recently attracting a great attention due to the well-known analogy between optics and hydrodynamics, where rogue wave formation and prediction is a priority field of investigations. In this contribution, we show numerical results about extreme events occurring in the transverse section of the field emitted by a broad-area semiconductor laser with saturable absorber. We believe that our system, being intrinsically two-dimensional, may give some precious insights on the focusing mechanisms giving rise to rogue wave formation in oceans, mechanisms that could be absent in one-dimensional systems.