Abstract
Turbulence is a challenging feature common to a wide range of complex phenomena. Random fibre lasers are a special class of lasers in which the feedback arises from multiple scattering in a one-dimensional disordered cavity-less medium. Here we report on statistical signatures of turbulence in the distribution of intensity fluctuations in a continuous-wave-pumped erbium-based random fibre laser, with random Bragg grating scatterers. The distribution of intensity fluctuations in an extensive data set exhibits three qualitatively distinct behaviours: a Gaussian regime below threshold, a mixture of two distributions with exponentially decaying tails near the threshold and a mixture of distributions with stretched-exponential tails above threshold. All distributions are well described by a hierarchical stochastic model that incorporates Kolmogorov’s theory of turbulence, which includes energy cascade and the intermittence phenomenon. Our findings have implications for explaining the remarkably challenging turbulent behaviour in photonics, using a random fibre laser as the experimental platform.
Highlights
Turbulence is a challenging feature common to a wide range of complex phenomena
We show that the interplay of nonlinearity and disorder is essential to induce photonic turbulence in the distribution of intensity fluctuations in the random laser phase of Er-random fibre laser (RFL)
The complex behaviour of random lasers and random fibre lasers has been recently accounted for in a statistical physics approach that establishes a formal correspondence between these photonic systems and disordered magnetic spin glasses[32,33,34,41]
Summary
Turbulence is a challenging feature common to a wide range of complex phenomena. Random fibre lasers are a special class of lasers in which the feedback arises from multiple scattering in a one-dimensional disordered cavity-less medium. Several advances in random fibre lasers have been exploited lately, in particular in conventional optical fibres[23], including applications in optical telecommunications and temperature sensing In contrast to both conventional and fibre lasers, where the feedback providing gain amplification is mediated by a closed cavity formed by mirrors or fibre Bragg reflectors[24,25], the optical feedback in random lasers and random fibre lasers arises from the multiple scattering of photons in a disordered medium, thereby forming an open-complex, disordered nonlinear system, in which light propagation occurs in the presence of gain, leading to laser emission[26,27]. In the turbulent emission regime, the theoretical description is possible only through a superposition or mixture of statistics that arises from a hierarchical stochastic model for the multiscale fluctuations
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