title: Controlling cavity solitons by means of photorefractive soliton electro-activation.
abstract: We consider a hybrid system consisting of a centrosymmetric photorefractive crystal in contact with a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser. We numerically investigate the generation and control of cavity solitons (CSs) by propagating a plane wave through electro-activated solitonic waveguides in the crystal. In such a compound scheme, which couples a propagative/conservative field dynamics to a bistable/dissipative one, we show that by changing the electro-activation voltage of the crystal, the CSs can be turned on and shifted with controlled velocity across the device section, on the scale of tens of nanoseconds. The configuration can be exploited for applications to optical information encoding and processing.
authors.affiliation: Dipartimento di Scienza e Alta Tecnologia, Università dell’Insubria, via Valleggio 11, Como I-22100, Italy. lorenzo.columbo@gmail.com
authors.forename: Lorenzo
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Columbo
authors.forename: Carlo
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Rizza
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brambilla
authors.forename: Franco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Prati
authors.forename: Giovanna
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Tissoni