Abstract
Recent experimental as well as analytical/numerical investigations of lasers have shown surprising analogies with the fields of fluid dynamics, superfluids, and superconductors. The phenomena observed include quantized vortices as in superfluids, vortex lattices as in superconductors, vortex annihilation, and creation, and obstacle flows as in fluids. We show that our observations can be explained by the possibility to recast the class-A-laser equations in forms of a complex Ginzburg-Landau equation. The convective instability of these equations leads to formation of radiation patterns in the form of “modes”. Further instabilities like Benjamin-Feir can lead to “defect-mediated turbulence”. Moving vortices are found in class-B-lasers, relating optics to the dynamics of excitable media with 2- and 3- dimensional rotors.Optics is thus found at this point in time to integrate itself into the wider general field of non-linear physics, whose various subfields such as chemistry, fluid dynamics, plasmas are related to one another by common equations, common instabilities and common phenomenology.
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Weiss, C.O., Staliunas, K., Smith, C.P., Slekys, G., Tarroja, M.F.H. (1993). Fluid Analogies in Optics. In: Caflisch, R.E., Papanicolaou, G.C. (eds) Singularities in Fluids, Plasmas and Optics. NATO ASI Series, vol 404. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2022-7_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2022-7_26
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