Optical puff mediated laminar-turbulent polarization transition

Various physical structures exhibit a fundamentally probabilistic nature over
diverse scales in space and time, to the point that the demarcation line between quantum and
classic laws gets blurred. Here, we characterize the probability of intermittency in the
laminar-turbulence transition of a partially mode-locked fiber laser system, whose degree of
coherence is deteriorated by multiple mode mixing. Two competing processes, namely the
proliferation and the decay of an optical turbulent puff, determine a critical behavior for the
onset of turbulence in such a nonlinear dissipative system. A new kind of polarization rogue
waves is introduced at the point of transition to polarization turbulence. The probabilistic
description of the puff-mediated laminar-turbulence polarization transition provides an
additional degree of freedom for our understanding of the complex physics of lasers.