Spatial soliton addressing in semiconductor devices

Recent researches have shown the possibility of exciting two-dimensional spatial soliton-like structures in the transverse field profile of broad-area nonlinear resonators, in particular, of absorptive-dispersive interferometers with saturation. Such structure are stable, whereas 2-D solitons are unstable versus diffractive collapse (broadening) in the purely dispersive Kerr self focusing (defocusing) model. When the system is characterized by the presence of a modulational instability, these Localized Structures (LS) consist in portions of modulated field profile (peaks of intensity) coexisting in the transverse plane with homogeneous background. The degeneracy of transverse field profiles, with respects to the peaks' number and position in the transverse plan, is extremely high, so that the peaks can be treated as individual entities since, to some extent, they do not influence reciprocally. We study the spatio-temporal dynamics of different nonlinear optical systems, and show that stable LS are a commonplace for extended operational domains, especially in tailormade models which describe either a semiconductor amplifier (active medium below lasing threshold) or a passive multiple quantum well. Our simulations suggest that the LS remain stable under diffusion of the charge carriers and moderate incoherent noise. The techniques for addressing the solitons exploited in [5], turning them on and off, have similarly been found quite effective for the different systems investigated.