Thermalization Management via Local Nonlinearities and Disorder

The modal power distribution of an incident beam in multicore fibers (or arrays of coupled resonators) converges to a Rayleigh-Jeans distribution (RJ), even in the case where only one core (resonator) is nonlinear. It turns out that disorder inhibits the thermalization process, thus protecting information encoded in the initial beam preparation. Specifically, we find that these systems undergo a partial thermalization, with only those modes with localization centers sufficiently close to the nonlinear site converging to RJ. We develop a universal one-parameter scaling theory for the percentage of thermalized modes and show that this one-parameter scaling is equal to the ratio of the localization length to the total number of modes.