Cavity-soliton motion in the presence of device defects

Cavity solitons (CSs) are localized structures appearing as single intensity peaks in the homogeneous background of the field emitted by a nonlinear (micro) resonator driven by a coherent field (holding beam). By introducing a phase gradient in the holding beam, it is possible to induce CS drift. This motion is strongly influenced by the presence of defects in the device structure. We analyze numerically two situations that appeared in the experiments. In the first one, a structure is self-generated on the defect and a regular sequence of moving CS originates from it. We investigate the properties of this “tap” of CS as a function of the defect characteristics and of the parameters values. The second situation corresponds to the interaction between a moving CS and a defect, which plays a fundamental role in CS applications such as the delay line or the shift register.