Microresonator defects as sources of drifting cavity solitons

Cavity solitons (CS) are localized structures appearing as single intensity peaks in the homogeneous background of the field emitted by a nonlinear (micro)resonator. In real devices, their position is strongly influenced by the presence of defects in the device structure. In this Letter we show that the interplay between these defects and a phase gradient in the driving field induces the spontaneous formation of a regular sequence of CSs moving in the gradient direction. Hence, defects behave as a device built-in CS source, where the CS generation rate can be set by controlling the system parameters

Pulsing and excitable solitons in a semiconductor laser with saturable absorber

Cavity solitons (CS) are controllable localized light peaks on a low-intensity, homogeneous (or quasi-homogeneous) background and offer a variety of applications from optical memories to all-optical delay lines. A semiconductor laser (VCSEL) with an intracavity saturable absorber realizes a cavity soliton laser, where the CS sit over a zero-intensity background, and may behave as independent microlasers

Cavity Solitons in Semiconductor Devices

Cavity solitons represent a class of dissipative solitons which are generated inside an optical resonator. They have attracted considerable interest in the recent years due to their possible application to optical information processing. First of all, this review chapter illustrates the physics of cavity solitons in semiconductor devices. We discuss the experiments which demonstrated cavity solitons in vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers, both below and above threshold, and all the theory which accompanied such experiments. Those features of the experimental results, which relate to prospective applications, are highlighted. The final part of the chapter deals with the theory of the cavity soliton laser