Abstract

We report in this communication the coexistence phenomenon relating two of the most challenging behaviors of complex systems: turbulence and spin glass. In 1998, Bohr, Jensen and Paladin [1] conjectured that it would be possible to find a connection between them, although they pointed out that “it could be too early to decide whether it can pave the way to a deeper understanding of intermittency in fully developed turbulence”. Both effects have been widely studied in a diversity of physical systems, including photonic ones, particularly in the field of random lasers and random fiber lasers [2,3]. However, it was only recently that the coexistence of turbulence-like and spin-glass behavior was identified in any experimental system, once again in a photonics system based on a random fiber laser (RFL) [4]. The experimental results were theoretically supported by a newly proposed photonic Pearson coefficient, with which the experimental results could be well fitted to describe both the turbulent and the glassy behavior in the RFL.

© 2019 IEEE