Abstract

Cavity solitons in optical systems have been studied for two decades in a large variety of optical systems. Nevertheless, lasers are a kind of systems which do not display (except vortices) this interesting type of dissipative structure in a natural way, i.e., for a laser exhibits localized structure it is necessary some additional action on the laser as introducing an intracavity saturable absorber or injecting an external signal¹. An exception to this "rule" is the cascade laser which has been predicted to exhibit cavity solitons without the need of any action on the laser, but no experimental confirmation of this exists. Here we show theoretically that bidirectional lasers can spontaneously form cavity solitons under appropriate conditions.

© 2007 IEEE