Revision 1

Accepted · first revision · record

Title: First-principles statistics of lasing modes in random lasers
Plain: A random laser has no mirrors: light bounces among random scatterers in a material with gain until it lases. A theory that predicts how many modes lase, what they look like and how their output fluctuates from shot to shot is still missing.
Precise: Multimode random laser with saturable gain in a disordered medium of scattering mean free path l, size $L >> l$, from the diffusive regime ($kl >> 1$, $k$ the wavenumber) toward localization. Quantities: number of lasing modes versus pump, their spatial profiles and the shot-to-shot emission statistics (including Levy-type heavy tails). SALT (steady-state ab initio laser theory) solves single disorder realizations; an answer is an ensemble theory that predicts these statistics with no fitted parameters and is checked against an experiment with characterized disorder.
Settled by: Comparison of measured mode number, spectra and intensity statistics in a sample of known l and gain with ensemble-averaged first-principles laser simulations.
Kind: phenomenon
Answer type: mechanism
References: (empty)
Literature status: open
Status note: (empty)
Posed since: (empty)