THEORY OF CAVITY SOLITONS

摘要

The existence and dynamical and other properties of cavity solitons are reviewed. These are bright, stable, non-diffracting spots of light in a driven optical cavity. The cavity must contain a nonlinear medium, but cavity solitons are supported by many media which do not support ordinary (propagating) spatial solitons. We use the Kerr cavity as a first example to describe methods to find them and analyse their stability. We demonstrate a sizeable domain of stability of two-dimensional cavity solitons in a Kerr cavity. Some other cavity soliton systems are briefly described. We show that cavity solitons have properties interesting for applications to optical information processing. Semiconductor microresonators are particularly promising, and we outline some results from models of such systems.