Ricerc@Sapienza

Rogue waves are giant perturbations that form out of noise, reach enormous amplitudes that would be impossibly rare for Gaussian distributed statistical events, and rapidly decay back into noise. Although rogue events appear in many diverse field of science, from water waves to optical propagation, their origin is still not understood, a situation that has led to an ever-growing interest in the scientific community. Scientists now argue about links between rogue waves and other complex phenomena as wave turbulence and glassy behavior. A major hurdle in this research effort is the difficulty in investigating abnormal waves in controlled laboratory conditions.
The goal of this proposal is providing experimental evidence of the link between rogue waves and the so-called replica symmetry breaking transition, as well as their relation with strong turbulence. An extensive theoretical background based on the theory of integrability and disordered nonlinear waves will be developed and tested using beam propagation in photorefractive media.
The proposers carried out pioneering studies in nonlinear optics, discovering new regimes such as scale-free optics (Nat.Photon.2011) and anti-diffraction (Nat.Photon.2015). In recent developments, they reported the observation of rogue waves in photorefractive media (PRL2015) and three-dimensional rogue waves (APL2015) and developed a novel theoretical framework based on statistical mechanical models and paradigms taken from the science of complex systems (OPTICA2015, Opt.Exp.2017).The authors also reported the first experimental evidence of replica symmetry breaking in photonics (Nat.Comm.2015).
We pool together three groups at the Physics Department: P1) the experimental group of Eugenio Del Re with a leading international role in nonlinear optics; P2) the theoretical group of Paolo Maria Santini with a world-renowned expertise in solitons; P3) the group of Claudio Conti who pioneered the science of complexity in nonlinear waves.