Measurement of scaling laws for shock waves in thermal nonlocal media.

We are able to detect the details of spatial optical collisionless wave breaking through the high aperture imaging of a beam suffering shock in a fluorescent nonlinear nonlocal thermal medium. This allows us to directly measure how nonlocality and nonlinearity affect the point of shock formation and compare results with numerical simulations.

Beam instabilities in the scale-free regime.

The instabilities arising in a one-dimensional beam sustained by the diffusive photorefractive nonlinearity in out-of-equilibrium ferroelectrics are theoretically and numerically investigated. In the "scale-free model," in striking contrast with the well-known spatial modulational instability, two different beam instabilities dominate: a defocusing and a fragmenting process. Both are independent of the beam power and are not associated with any specific periodic pattern.

Shock waves in disordered media.

We experimentally investigate the interplay between spatial shock waves and the degree of disorder during nonlinear optical propagation in a thermal defocusing medium. We characterize the way the shock point is affected by the amount of disorder and scales with wave amplitude. Evidence for the existence of a phase diagram in terms of nonlinearity and amount of randomness is reported. The results are in quantitative agreement with a theoretical approach based on the hydrodynamic approximation.

Frustrated brownian motion of nonlocal solitary waves.

We investigate the evolution of solitary waves in a nonlocal medium in the presence of disorder. By using a perturbational approach, we show that an increasing degree of nonlocality may largely hamper the brownian motion of self-trapped wave packets. The result is valid for any kind of nonlocality and in the presence of nonparaxial effects. Analytical predictions are compared with numerical simulations based on stochastic partial differential equations.

Phase diagram and complexity of mode-locked lasers: from order to disorder.

We investigate mode-locking processes in lasers displaying a variable degree of structural randomness. By a spin-glass theoretic approach, we analyze the mean-field Hamiltonian and derive a phase diagram in terms of pumping rate and degree of disorder. Paramagnetic (noisy continuous wave emission), ferromagnetic (standard passive mode locking), and spin-glass phases with an exponentially large number of configurations are identified. The results are also relevant for other physical systems displaying a random Hamiltonian, such as Bose-condensed gases and nonlinear optics.