JORGE TREDICCE - Extreme events in Dynamical Systems

Jorge Tredicce.

DF - FCEyN - UBA.

Jueves 13/8/2015, 14 hs.

Aula Seminario, 2do piso, Pabellón I.

Rogue waves, earthquakes of high magnitude, financial crises, tsunamis, epileptic seizures…. have they any common feature other than their catastrophic and undesirable character? Yes!, they are extreme events. One of the main objectives of studying extreme events is to provide knowledge and tools that can contribute to the reduction of vulnerability. Greater attention is now paid to their causes and their study includes observation, statistics and prediction, in particular due to the rising societal exposure. During the last decade, extreme events have become the hot topic of research in complex systems related to both the natural and human world. However one central challenge is to develop models able to link the dynamical behaviour to the origin of extreme events and to the associated statistical behaviour. The rarity of extreme events makes them hard to study and even harder to predict, such events often appear in environments or situations where measurements are difficult. These problems have led to an absence of extensive data sets generated under controlled conditions, resulting in associated difficulties in studying their generation mechanisms and statistical properties in a quantitative manner. But such events occur in deterministic systems, and therefore our capacity to predict them is strongly diminished by our proper ignorance about the causes that are able to generate them. One of the main objectives of our actual research activity is to provide test benches and simple models able to produce extreme events whose physical origin would be easily identified. Here we present some “corner-table“ experiments using laser systems generating optical rogue waves, thus pulses of high intensity satisfying the condition to be called extreme events. We studied their origin, mechanisms and predictability.