The laminar-turbulent transition in a fibre laser

Studying transition to a highly disordered state of turbulence from a linearly stable coherent laminar state is conceptually and technically challenging and immensely important, e.g. all pipe and channel flows are of that type. In optics, understanding how systems lose coherence with increase of spatial size or excitation level is an open fundamental problem of practical importance. Here we identify, arguably, the simplest system where this classical problem can be studied: we learnt to operate a fibre laser in laminar and turbulent regimes. We show that laminar phase is an analogue of a one-dimensional coherent condensate and turbulence onset is through a spatial loss of coherence. We discover a new mechanism of laminar-turbulent transition in laser operation: condensate destruction by the clustering of dark and grey solitons. This is important both for the design of devices exploiting coherent dynamics and for conceptually new technologies based on systems operating far from thermodynamic equilibrium.