Towards a nonequilibrium thermodynamic description of incoherent nonlinear optics

This concise review is aimed at providing an introduction to the kinetic theory of partially coherent optical waves propagating in nonlinear media. The subject of incoherent nonlinear optics received a renewed interest since the first experimental demonstration of incoherent solitons in slowly responding photorefractive crystals. Several theories have been successfully developed to provide a detailed description of the novel dynamical features inherent to partially coherent nonlinear optical waves. However, such theories leave unanswered the following important question: Which is the long term (spatiotemporal) evolution of a partially incoherent optical field propagating in a nonlinear medium? In complete analogy with kinetic gas theory, one may expect that the incoherent field may evolve, owing to nonlinearity, towards a thermodynamic equilibrium state. Weak-turbulence theory is shown to describe the essential properties of this irreversible process of thermal wave relaxation to equilibrium. Precisely, the theory describes an irreversible evolution of the spectrum of the field towards a thermodynamic equilibrium state. The irreversible behavior is expressed through the H-theorem of entropy growth, whose origin is analogous to the celebrated Boltzmann's H-theorem of kinetic gas theory. It is shown that thermal wave relaxation to equilibrium may be characterized by the existence of a genuine condensation process, whose thermodynamic properties are analogous to those of Bose-Einstein condensation, despite the fact that the considered optical wave is completely classical. In spite of the formal reversibility of optical wave propagation, the condensation process occurs by means of an irreversible evolution of the field towards a homogeneous plane-wave (condensate) with small-scale fluctuations superimposed ( uncondensed particles), which store the information necessary for the reversible propagation. As a remarkable result, an increase of entropy (disorder) in the optical field requires the generation of a coherent structure (plane-wave). We show that, beyond the standard thermodynamic limit, wave condensation also occurs in two spatial dimensions. The numerical simulations are in quantitative agreement with the kinetic wave theory, without any adjustable parameter. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America.