Cavity solitons in vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers

Abstract

We investigate a control of the motion of localized structures of light by means of delay feedback in the transverse section of a broad area nonlinear optical system. The delayed feedback is found to induce a spontaneous motion of a solitary localized structure that is stationary and stable in the absence of feedback. We focus our analysis on an experimentally relevant system namely the Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser (VCSEL). In the absence of the delay feedback we present experimental evidence of stationary localized structures in a 80 $\mu$m aperture VCSEL. The spontaneous formation of localized structures takes place above the lasing threshold and under optical injection. Then, we consider the effect of the time-delayed optical feedback and investigate analytically the role of the phase of the feedback and the carrier lifetime on the self-mobility properties of the localized structures. We show that these two parameters affect strongly the space time dynamics of two-dimensional localized structures. We derive an analytical formula for the threshold associated with drift instability of localized structures and a normal form equation describing the slow time evolution of the speed of the moving structure.

arXiv comment7 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Realization of a semiconductor-based cavity soliton laser
• Cavity Soliton Laser based on mutually coupled semiconductor microresonators
• Patterns and localized structures in bistable semiconductor resonators
• Instabilities of localized structures in dissipative systems with delayed feedback
• Delayed feedback control of self-mobile cavity solitons
• Logical operations with Localized Structures

Cited by in corpus (6)

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• Bifurcation structure of cavity soliton dynamics in a VCSEL with saturable absorber and time-delayed feedback
• Influence of optical feedback on harmonic pulsating solutions of long-cavity mode-locked VECSELs
• Phase incoherent photonic molecules in V-shaped mode-locked VECSELs
• Delayed feedback control of self-mobile cavity solitons in a wide-aperture laser with a saturable absorber