Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 053901 (2001)

Credit: © 2011 APS

The physical mechanism behind the formation of rogue waves — waves with seemingly spontaneous large amplitudes — has long been an interesting research topic for oceanologists and physicists, including those working in photonics. An important question is whether rogue waves can be described by a fully deterministic process with noise as a driving force. Cristian Bonatto and co-workers from Spain, France and Brazil recently carried out an investigation into the generation of rogue waves using a semiconductor laser that received optical injection from a continuous-wave master laser. The researchers not only showed that sporadic high-amplitude pulses can be observed with such a simple and inexpensive laser set-up, but also concluded that the rogue waves they observed are generated from deterministic nonlinearities. Their conclusion was based on good qualitative agreement between experimental results and simulated results from a simple, deterministic noise-free rate equation model.