Rogue waves in optics have been recently attracting great attention, for the possibility of studying these events in a well controlled environment. Here we show numerical results about extreme events in the (2D) intensity profile of a broad-area semiconductor laser with saturable absorber.

This system can emit a turbulent state, where the light intensity oscillates aperiodically in space and time. We developed a numerical method for the detection of spatio-temporal maxima of intensity in this turbulent regime, and we compare their distribution with heavy-tail distributions of generalised extreme value theory. We can demonstrate the existence of extreme events according to both the two most common definitions of rogue waves threshold. We believe that our system, being intrinsically two-dimensional, could give some precious insights on the focusing mechanisms at the origin of rogue waves in oceans, which could be absent in one-dimensional systems such as fibers.