Turbulence-Induced Rogue Waves in Kerr Resonators

Abstract

Spontaneous emergence of self-organized patterns and their bifurcations towards a regime of complex dynamics in nonequilibrium dissipative systems is a paradigm of phase transition. Indeed, the behavior of these patterns in the highly nonlinear regime remains less explored, even in recent high-quality-factor resonators such as Kerr-nonlinear optical ones. Here, we investigate theoretically and experimentally the alteration of the resulting Kerr frequency combs from the weakly to the highly nonlinear regime, in the frameworks of spatiotemporal chaos, and dissipative phase transitions. We reveal the existence of a striking and easily accessible scenario of spatiotemporal chaos, free of cavity solitons, in a monostable operating regime, wherein a transition to amplitude turbulence via spatiotemporal intermittency is evidenced. Moreover, statistics of the light bursts in the resulting turbulent regime unveils the existence of rogue waves as extreme events characterized by long-tail statistics.6 MoreReceived 25 July 2018Revised 19 December 2018DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevX.9.011054Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasBifurcationsPattern formationSpatiotemporal chaosNonlinear DynamicsGeneral Physics