Optical rogue waves in a laser with saturable absorber

Summary form only given. Extreme events and rogue waves (RW) are commonly know as events with very high amplitude whose frequent occurrence is not explainable through the statistics assumed for the set of data under study. Born in oceanography, the concept of extreme events has been extended to many different optical systems in recent years, such as optical fibers [1], laser systems and linear optical systems [2, 3].In the work presented here, we numerically study the presence of extreme events in a spatio-temporal chaotic regime for the transverse field intensity (orthogonal to the propagation direction) emitted by a Vertical Cavity Semiconductor Emitting Laser (VCSEL) with an intracavity saturable absorber [4], as the one used in experiments [5]: this system is two-dimensional in space (+ time) and is also known for the presence of cavity solitons, both stationary, self-pulsing and chaotic [4]. The main goal of this work is to go beyond the raw statistical analysis of the intensity values in every point at every time: we are searching for extreme events, intended as spatio-temporal maxima of extremely high intensity, we study their dependence on the laser parameters, in order to get the best configuration to observe them experimentally, and explore the connection of these events with cavity solitons.