Optical rogue waves in multifractal photonic arrays

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates optical rogue waves in the far-field scattering from specially designed photonic arrays, linking their formation to multifractality and heavy-tail statistics, with implications for controlling high-intensity waves.

Contribution

It introduces a novel connection between optical rogue waves and multifractality in photonic arrays based on prime element distributions, enabling potential control of rogue waves.

Findings

Optical rogue waves are observed in scattering from prime-based photonic arrays.

A link is established between rogue wave formation and multifractality.

Heavy-tail distributions describe the fluctuations in scattered radiation.

Abstract

Optical rogue waves are demonstrated in the far-field scattered radiation from photonic arrays designed according to the aperiodic distributions of prime elements in complex quadratic fields. Specifically, by studying light diffraction from Eisenstein and Gaussian prime arrays we establish a connection between the formation of optical rogue waves and multifractality in the visible single-scattering regime. We link strong multifractality with the heavy-tail probability distributions that describe the fluctuations of scattered radiation from the fabricated arrays. Our findings pave the way to control high-intensity rogue waves using deterministic arrays of dielectric nanostructures for enhanced sensing and lithographic applications.