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Triggering extreme events at the nanoscale in photonic seas

Abstract

Hurricanes, tsunamis, rogue waves and tornadoes are rare natural phenomena that embed an exceptionally large amount of energy, which appears and quickly disappears in a probabilistic fashion. This makes them difficult to predict and hard to generate on demand. Here we demonstrate that we can trigger the onset of rare events akin to rogue waves controllably, and systematically use their generation to break the diffraction limit of light propagation. We illustrate this phenomenon in the case of a random field, where energy oscillates among incoherent degrees of freedom. Despite the low energy carried by each wave, we illustrate how to control a mechanism of spontaneous synchronization, which constructively builds up the spectral energy available in the whole bandwidth of the field into giant structures, whose statistics is predictable. The larger the frequency bandwidth of the random field, the larger the amplitude of rare events that are built up by this mechanism. Our system is composed of an integrated optical resonator, realized on a photonic crystal chip. Through near-field imaging experiments, we record confined rogue waves characterized by a spatial localization of 206 nm and with an ultrashort duration of 163 fs at a wavelength of 1.55 μm. Such localized energy patterns are formed in a deterministic dielectric structure that does not require nonlinear properties.

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Figure 1: Classical and diluted random walks of photons.
Figure 2: Photonic crystal resonator.
Figure 3: FDTD analysis of ultrafast subwavelength light localization
Figure 4: Summary of NSOM experimental results and comparison with theory.

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Acknowledgements

For the computer time, we used the resources of the KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory and the Red Dragon cluster of the Primalight group. This work is part of the research program of Kaust ‘Optics and plasmonics for efficient energy harvesting’ and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM), which is part of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). This work is supported by Kaust (Award No. CRG-1-2012-FRA-005), by NanoNextNL of the Dutch ministry EL&I and 130 partners and by the EU FET project ‘SPANGL4Q’.

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Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

A.F. initiated the work and developed the theoretical model for the controlled formation of rogue waves. C.L. performed FDTD simulations. R.E.C.v.d.W., N.R., and L.K. realized NSOM measurements. A.D.F fabricated samples used in experiments. All authors contributed equally in the analysis and interpretation of experimental results. All authors contributed to writing the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to A. Fratalocchi.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Liu, C., van der Wel, R., Rotenberg, N. et al. Triggering extreme events at the nanoscale in photonic seas. Nature Phys 11, 358–363 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys3263

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