Theoretical aspects and potential applications of cavity solitons in semiconductor microresonators

Cavity solitons (CS) appear as self-confined light peaks embedded in the transverse profile of a homogeneous coherent field propagating in a nonlinear cavity. They have recently been predicted for GaAs semiconductor microcavities (both MQW and bulk), for which we have developed a microscopic model that describes the field and the carrier dynamics inside the active region. Here we improve our previous model by adding the temperature dynamics. A detailed study of the instabilites affecting the homogeneous stationary state of the output field is performed. In this way we can address the numerical research of patterns and CS. We then show how it is possible to study intrinsic stability properties of CS by means of semi-analytical techniques that allow to describe the destabilising mechanisms for solitons, mutual interaction properties and their response to perturbations; possible conceptual schemes for optical information treatment and logic gates are investigated.