General high-order rogue waves and their dynamics in the nonlinear Schrödinger equation

General high-order rogue waves in the nonlinear Schrödinger equation are derived by the bilinear method. These rogue waves are given in terms of determinants whose matrix elements have simple algebraic expressions. It is shown that the general N -th order rogue waves contain N −1 free irreducible complex parameters. In addition, the specific rogue waves obtained by Akhmediev et al. (Akhmediev et al. 2009 Phys. Rev. E 80 , 026601 ( doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.80.026601 )) correspond to special choices of these free parameters, and they have the highest peak amplitudes among all rogue waves of the same order. If other values of these free parameters are taken, however, these general rogue waves can exhibit other solution dynamics such as arrays of fundamental rogue waves arising at different times and spatial positions and forming interesting patterns.