Cavity solitons in broad-area vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers below threshold

Cavity solitons are stationary self-organized bright intensity peaks which form over a homogeneous background in the section of broad area radiation beams. They are generated by shining a writing/erasing laser pulse into a nonlinear optical cavity, driven by a holding beam. The ability to control their location and their motion by introducing phase or amplitude gradients in the holding beam makes them interesting as mobile pixels for all-optical processing units. We show the generation of a number of cavity solitons in broad-area vertical cavity semiconductor microresonators electrically pumped above transparency but slightly below threshold. We analyze the switching process in details. The observed spots can be written, erased, and manipulated as independent objects, as predicted by the theoretical model. An especially tailored one is used to simulate the studied phenomena and to compare our simulations to the experimental findings with good agreement.