Cavity solitons in a broad-area vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers with frequency-selective feedback

摘要

Spatial pattern formation in the field of nonlinear optics have received much attention in recent years. In particular localised structures such as cavity solitons (CS) have been experimentally demonstrated in semiconductor microcavities [1]. The compactness and fast response time of semiconductor devices could allow for parallel all-optical processing in telecommunications, where the binary information would be encoded in the form of localised structures in the transverse plane. The current schemes to obtain CS in a broad area vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSEL) use a holding beam (HB) to provide the system's bistability, a necessary condition for the existence of CS. This HB increases the complexity and size of the set-up, as this demands an additional laser source. Instead we followed a different approach for a self-sustained cavity soliton laser, removing the HB and adding a frequency-selective feedback, provided by a grating in Littrow configuration. The configuration of this external cavity is described in Figure 1. The broad area VCSEL has a 200μm oxide aperture and is electrically pumped.