The Spontaneous Cascading Mechanism Behind Critical Phenomena in Self-Coupled Lasers

The basic physics of lasers is characterized by a second-order continuous phase transition at the critical lasing threshold. Nevertheless, laser bistability with abrupt transitions has been reported in some laser systems, but its underlying mechanism has never been explored. Here we study experimentally and theoretically a novel nonlinearly self-coupled laser system. We show both experimentally and theoretically that this system experiences spontaneous cascading that yields an abrupt mixed-order transition. At the critical point, a long-lived cascading plateau is observed, characterized by a critical branching factor equal to one. When deviating from criticality, the branching factor departs monotonically from one. The critical scaling close to and at the critical point resembles similar phenomena observed recently in other interdependent systems, suggesting a common universal cascading origin for abrupt transitions. Our results shed light on the cascading mechanism of abrupt transitions in laser systems, which can be utilized for future research and applications.