Abstract: |
Besides their potential for high power high brightness lasers, coupled laser networks reveal intriguing physical phenomena. First, arrays of coupled fiber lasers with fluctuating lengths are shown to be a new type of random laser whose phase and power fluctuations agree with extreme value distributions of random matrices. Second, complex laser networks with homogenous time delayed coupling are shown to divide into phase synchronized clusters where the number of clusters is the greatest common divider of the number of lasers in simply connected loops. Finally, very large arrays of >1000 lasers with nearest neighbor negative coupling generate long range "anti-ferromagnetic" phase order which reveals "frustration" in certain type of lattices such as the Kagome lattice. |