Twin spotlight beam generation in quadratic crystals

Abstract

Optical rogue waves have been extensively studied in the past two decades. However, observations of multidimensional extreme wave events remain surprisingly scarce. In this work we present the experimental demonstration of the spontaneous generation of spatially localized two-dimensional beams in a quadratic nonlinear crystal, which are composed by twin components at the fundamental and the second-harmonic frequencies. These localized spots of light emerge from a wide background beam, and eventually disappear as the laser beam intensity is progressively increased.