Figure 1

(a) Experimental setup for the linear excitation of optical rogue waves: a laser input beam is focused and coupled into a multimode optical fiber; the output field is imaged onto a CCD camera; a SLM controls the input beam profile through variable transmittance masks $T(x,y)$; a lateral perturbation $n(t)$ rules the fiber bending. (b) Uniform and (c) inhomogeneous mask $T(x,y)$ (left), with corresponding output intensity distribution $I(x,y)$ (center) and one-dimensional intensity profile $I(x)$ (right) taken along an $x$ line of the corresponding central image; $I$ is the local intensity, and $⟨I⟩$ is the intensity averaged over the whole image. An optical rogue wave can be clearly observed in the one-dimensional profile of case (c).Reuse & Permissions

Figure 2

PDF of (a) the intensity and (b) the local maxima of the intensity at the output of the fiber. Solid gray (red) line, homogeneous mask; (black) empty dots, inhomogeneous mask; (red) filled dots, inhomogeneous mask and temporal perturbations; black dashed line, fit with an exponential function. In (a) the black solid line is a stretched exponential fit ($c_1=10$, $c_2=0.092$) and the inset shows the Gaussian PDF of the perturbation $n(t)$ producing the large-tailed PDF. The intensities are measured in gray values normalized from 0 to 256 and all plots are in log-lin scale.Reuse & Permissions

Figure 3

(a) Experimental distribution of the variance $\sigma$ of the single PDF measured over each homogeneous domain at the output of the optical fiber; (b) numerically calculated $1/c_1$ as a function of the tilt at the entrance of the fiber.Reuse & Permissions

Figure 4

Log-Poisson distribution of the waiting times between successive rogue waves; (red) squares and (black) dots correspond to, respectively, low and high amplitudes of $n(t)$.Reuse & Permissions

Figure 5

Numerically calculated nondimensional indicator of rogue wave statistics for a nonlinear optical cavity vs the transverse coordinate $x$ and for increasing pump intensity; $I_p/I_{th}=4$, 6, 8 for the blue (lower), green (middle), and red (higher) curve.Reuse & Permissions