Enhancing optical extreme events through input wave disorder

We demonstrate how the emergence of extreme events strongly depends on the correlation length of the input field distribution. Observing the behavior of optical waves in turbulent photorefractive propagation with partially incoherent excitations, we find that rogue waves are strongly enhanced for a characteristic input correlation scale. Waveform analysis identifies this scale with a characteristic peak-intensity-independent wave size, suggesting a general role played by saturation in the nonlinear response in rogue phenomena.