Spatiotemporal complexity

Extended microcavity lasers displaying a high aspect ratio are ideal candidates to study the onset of spatiotemporal complexity in physical systems. Spatiotemporal complexity can range from optical self-organization to spatiotemporal chaos and extreme events formation. Lately, there has been a renewed interest in the field, in particular in a context of understanding rogue phenomena and extremes : these are characterized in lasers by high and rare intensity pulses. But they can occur in many areas in Nature ranging from hydrodynamics (rogue waves) to geology (earthquakes), finance (financial crash) and biology (epileptic seizures). The physical understanding of their possible formation mechanisms go thus well beyond the specific system at stake.

  Objectives

Our main objective is to better understand the physics of extreme events appearance in nonlinear dissipative systems and to understand how to characterize spatiotemporal complexity (spatiotemporal chaos).