Abstract

The study of spatial optical solitons has become a hot topic because of its importance in scientific research and technological applications. It is interesting to investigate solitons in semiconductor gain media. Besides enjoying wide technical application, a semiconductor gain medium is near absorption resonance and its nonlinearity stems from the gain saturation and the antiguiding factor. The resulting nonlinear Schrödinger equation is more complicated than that for a Kerr-medium. Spatial solitary waves have been experimentally observed recently. Here we show analytically that spatial solitary waves exist in a semiconductor gain medium pumped just above a threshold value. Numerical simulations show that these spatial solitary waves are not perturbation stable, but can propagate long enough for practical device applications.

© 1996 IEEE