Abstract

Investigation of spatio-temporal instabilities is of relevance not only for fundamental, but also for technical aspects. The appearance of such instabilities can cause problems even for commercial applications, as it is already the case for some laser applications (e g broad area semiconductor lasers, "green problem" in frequency-doubling). Near a first threshold, where often regular states evolve, analogies between nonlinear optics and other fields of self-organisation processes, like in hydrodynamics, are quite strong. By far less understood are disordered and often very dynamic states, appearing for higher values of pump power. In contrast to other fields, not even general phenomenological models exist for such states in nonlinear optics, which nevertheless often are denoted as "optical turbulence".

© 1998 IEEE