Pattern dynamics in large aspect ratio lasers

Recent experiments have established that exotic transverse patterns such as defects, squares etc, can emerge across the aperture of a large Fresnel number laser. A key theoretical observation, for example, is that the Maxwell-Bloch equations describing wide aperture homogeneously, inhomogeneously broadened lasers or, the many-body Maxwell-Bloch equations describing a broad area semiconductor laser, are isomorphic to a certain class of universal order parameter equations describing patterns in general