Recent progress in investigating optical rogue waves

International audienceThe science of rogue waves in optics is now over five years old, and it hasemerged as an area of broad interest to researchers across the physicalsciences [1]. This area of study was initiated by the pioneering measurement ofSolli et al [2] when analysing supercontinuum generation in optical fibres. Theirmeasurements, using a novel dispersive Fourier transform technique to capturehigh-speed events in the time domain, observed extraordinarily high amplitudepeaks at certain wavelengths in the chaotic spectrum from the supercontinuum.By analogy with the extreme waves in the ocean [3], of wide interest after 1995,such high amplitude pulses were described as ‘optical rogue waves’