Levy statistical fluctuations from a random amplifying medium

Abstract

We report our studies of emission from a dye-scatterer system, commonly known as random amplifying medium (RAM). It is found to exhibit non-Gaussian statistics of emission intensity over the ensemble of random realizations. The amplification is dominated by certain improbable events that are "larger than rare", which give the intensity statistics a Lévy-like fat tail. This, to the best of our knowledge, provides the first experimental realization of the Lévy statistics in the optics of a random amplifying medium, and the analysis thereof. Notably, the Lévy exponent is continuously tunable parametrically.