Abstract

We investigate the new types of transverse patterns in wide-aperture passive interferometers and lasers. We propose and analyze equations of motion for a diffractive autosoliton in passive nonlinear interferometers excited by external coherent radiation with gradually non-uniform characteristics. If external radiation wave front does not contain dislocations at the interferometer aperture, autosoliton moves along the steepest descent lines of effective potential expressed by linear combination of the intensity and the phase of radiation incident on the interferometer. With the dislocations, the motion with autosoliton rotation becomes possible. The coupled switching wave and autosoliton structures in bistable and multistable interferometers are studied. The dynamics of autosoliton formation in conditions of transverse field structure instability and in nonlinear interferometer with unstable resonator is considered. The peculiarity of autosolitons in lasers with saturated absorption is a diffractive shift of generation frequency. This aspect being taken into account, positive (bright) and negative (dark) laser autosolitons are demonstrated and autosolitons interaction is investigated.

© 1992 Optical Society of America