Controlling cavity solitons by means of photorefractive soliton electro-activation

We consider a hybrid system consisting of a centrosymmetric photorefractive crystal in contact with a verticalcavity 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. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America