Clear evidence of rogue waves in a multistable system is revealed by experiments with an erbium-doped fiber laser driven by harmonic pump modulation. The mechanism for the rogue wave formation lies in the interplay of stochastic processes with multistable deterministic dynamics. Low-frequency noise applied to a diode pump current induces rare jumps to coexisting subharmonic states with high-amplitude pulses perceived as rogue waves. The probability of these events depends on the noise filtered frequency and grows up when the noise amplitude increases. The probability distribution of spike amplitudes confirms the rogue wave character of the observed phenomenon. The results of numerical simulations are in good agreement with experiments.

Critical phenomena in complex networks, and the emergence of dynamical abrupt transitions in the macroscopic state of the system are currently a subject of the outmost interest. We report evidence of an explosive phase synchronization in networks of chaotic units. Namely, by means of both extensive simulations of networks made up of chaotic units, and validation with an experiment of electronic circuits in a star configuration, we demonstrate the existence of a first-order transition towards synchronization of the phases of the networked units. Our findings constitute the first prove of this kind of synchronization in practice, thus opening the path to its use in real-world applications.

Synchronization of coupled oscillators exhibiting the coexistence of chaotic attractors is investigated, both numerically and experimentally. The route from the asynchronous motion to a completely synchronized state is characterized by the sequence of type-I and on-off intermittencies, intermittent phase synchronization, anticipated synchronization, and period-doubling phase synchronization.

Optics InfoBase is the Optical Society's online library for flagship journals, partnered and copublished journals, and recent proceedings from OSA conferences.

In our recent Letter [ Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 274101 (2011)], we demonstrated that slow random perturbations of a system parameter were responsible for the emergence of rogue waves in a fiber laser with coexisting attractors. In this paper we investigate how the probability of a particular state to appear in multistate intermittency can be controlled by low-pass noise filtering. We show that the probability of some states depends nonmonotonously on the noise amplitude and cutoff frequency. The conditions for the emergence of extreme pulses in a erbium-doped fiber laser are analyzed numerically and experimentally.