Symmetry Breaking and Defect-Mediated Turbulence in Lasers

There is a new issue that needs to be explored which concerns the spatial behavior of optical systems and lasers in particular: are lasers able to display the type of complex spatial structures such as one finds under fully developed turbulence conditions in hydrodynamic systems? Turbulence involves increasing complexity not only in time but also in space; one could argue that, just as dynamical chaos results from the presence of at least a few competing frequencies in a nonlinear system, spatial complexity may be obtained when competing spatial structures play a relevant role in the evolution of a dynamical system.