Spatiotemporal Chaos Synchronization In A Large Array Of Locally Coupled Nonidentical Lasers

We numerically investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of a large array of solid-state lasers. The lasers are locally coupled through their optical fields and are nonidentical as they are randomly detuned from a common reference frequency. We report the progressive synchronization of the amplitude and the phase of the laser electric fields as the coupling between the lasers increases: bright interference dots with high visibility emerge in the far field and a power-law behavior in the spatial correlations of the laser-intensity fluctuations is observed.