Visualizing optical rogue waves at the nanoscale in chaotic photonic crystal cavities

For centuries sailors have told stories about giant rogue or freak waves. These fabled waves would appear out of the blue to swallow ships whole and disappear again as quickly as they emerged. It lasted, however, until two decades ago before first scientific evidence of the existence of rogue waves was obtained from wave height measurements in the North Sea. Since then the interest for rogue waves has greatly increased and after the first observation of optical rogue waves by Solli et al. this interest expanded towards the optics community as well. This interest is to large extent fueled by the localized, high-intensity nature of rogue waves which might be utilized for created low-power sensing applications. Despite the interest, to date only the temporal behavior of rogue waves has been investigated . Here, we study the spatial behavior of rogue waves inside chaotic photonic crystal cavities. Chaos is present in a wide range of fields such as ocean acoustics , communication with chaotic lasers , branching of 2D electron flow and superconductivity , which explains the importance to understand how these high intensity waves can emerge in chaotic systems.