Abstract

Spontaneous spatial structures have recently been predicted and observed in many nonlinear optical systems [1]. Among such structures are localised bright spots in driven optical cavities [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. They share certain properties with spatial solitons, and are thus to some extent counter-parts of the soliton pulses being developed as bits for long-haul fibre-optic communications. Cavity spatial solitons could be natural bits for parallel processing of optical information, especially if they exist in semiconductor micro-resonators. Recent work [5, 6] is quite encouraging in that respect.

© 1998 Optical Society of America