Experimental evidence of extreme value statistics in Raman fiber lasers

We present an experiment in which the intracavity broadened spectrum of a Raman fiber laser is sliced by using a narrow-bandwidth optical filter. High-contrast fast fluctuations of the Stokes power are observed at the output of the optical filter. The statistics of the power fluctuations strongly change with the central wavelength of the filter, and rare extreme events are found to be generated in the far wings of the spectrum. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America