On the statistical interpretation of optical rogue waves

TL;DR

This paper uses numerical simulations to analyze the statistical properties of optical rogue waves in supercontinuum generation, highlighting the impact of spectral filtering and soliton collisions on extreme event statistics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed statistical analysis of optical rogue waves, emphasizing the role of soliton collisions and spectral filtering in supercontinuum generation.

Findings

Spectral filtering affects the distribution of peak power in supercontinuum.

Collision dynamics between solitons are key to understanding extreme events.

Unfiltered statistics can still exhibit long-tail distributions indicating rogue waves.

Abstract

Numerical simulations are used to discuss various aspects of "optical rogue wave" statistics observed in noise-driven fiber supercontinuum generation associated with highly incoherent spectra. In particular, we consider how long wavelength spectral filtering influences the characteristics of the statistical distribution of peak power, and we contrast the statistics of the spectrally filtered SC with the statistics of both the peak power of the most red-shifted soliton in the SC and the maximum peak power across the full temporal field with no spectral selection. For the latter case, we show that the unfiltered statistical distribution can still exhibit a long-tail, but the extreme-events in this case correspond to collisions between solitons of different frequencies. These results confirm the importance of collision dynamics in supercontinuum generation. We also show that the collision-induced events satisfy an extended hydrodynamic definition of "rogue wave" characteristics.