Observation of rogue events in non-Markovian light

Efforts to understand the physics of rogue waves have motivated the study of mechanisms that produce rare, extreme events, often through analogous optical setups. As many studies have reported nonlinear generation mechanisms, recent work has explored whether optical rogue events can be produced in linear systems. Here we report the observation of linear rogue events with tunable height, generated from light imprinted with a non-Markovian wavefront. Moreover, if the non-Markovian wavefront is allowed to propagate through a nonlinear medium, extraordinarily long-tailed intensity distributions are produced, which do not conform to the statistics previously observed in optical rogue wave experiments.