Instabilities of waves in nonlinear disordered media

Abstract

We develop a self-consistent theory of temporal fluctuations of a speckle pattern resulting from the multiple scattering of a coherent wave in a weakly nonlinear disordered medium. The speckle pattern is shown to become unstable if the nonlinearity exceeds a threshold value. The instability is due to a feedback provided by the multiple scattering and manifests itself in spontaneous fluctuations of the scattered intensity. The development of instability is independent of the sign of nonlinearity.