Light-Mode Condensation in Actively-Mode-Locked Lasers

We show that the formation of pulses in actively mode-locked lasers exhibits in certain conditions a transition of the laser mode system to a light pulse state that is similar to Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). The study is done in the framework of statistical light-mode dynamics with a mapping between the distribution of the laser eigenmodes to the equilibrium statistical physics of noninteracting bosons in an external potential. The light-mode BEC transition occurs for a mode-locking modulation that has a power law dependence on time with an exponent smaller than 2.