Abstract

The term "soliton" is increasingly used for any pulse or beam in which dispersion and/or diffraction is compensated on the average by nonlinearity. For soliton-like structures in optical resonators or cavities, the term "cavity soliton" [1] is a natural one. Of particular interest are two-dimensional (2D) cavity solitons written in the transverse plane of an optical resonator. Such structures could be natural "bits" for parallel processing of optical information, especially if they exist and are stable in semiconductor micro-resonators.

© 2000 IEEE