Ghost State of Light (opens in new tab)

We report the observation of a long-lived non-stationary state of light in a single-mode optical cavity. The observed state is a ghost of a saddle-node bifurcation which creates a bottleneck in phase space. While such ghosts are known to exist, accessing them is challenging because it requires a mechanism that steers the relaxation pathway away from the true attractor and into the bottleneck where the ghost emerges. Here we identify such a mec...