Intermittent burst of a super rogue wave in the breathing multi-soliton regime of an anomalous fiber ring cavity: An optical analogy to the hundred-year wave in the ocean

We report the intermittent burst of a super rogue wave in the multi-soliton (MS) regime of an anomalous-dispersion fiber ring cavity. We exploit the spatio-temporal measurement technique to log and capture the shot-to-shot wave dynamics of various pulse events in the cavity, and obtain the intensity probability density function out of them, which eventually unveils the inherent nature of some extreme events encompassed therein. In the breathing MS regime, a specific MS regime with heavy soliton population, the natural probability of pulse interaction among solitons and dispersive waves exponentially increases owing to the abnormal soliton population density. Combination of the probabilistically started soliton interactions and constructively intensifying dispersive waves in their vicinity can trigger an avalanche of extreme events with even higher intensities, culminating to a burst of a super rogue wave nearly ten times stronger than the average solitons observed in the cavity. Without any cavity modification or control, the process naturally repeats within a time scale in the order of ten seconds. This characteristic feature is intriguingly analogous to that of the hundred-year wave in the ocean, if taking into account the fact that the speed of light is roughly a million times faster than that of the wind wave in the open ocean.