Abstract

Damped-driven Fabry-Pérot cavities are among the prominent dissipative systems in nonlinear optics. In this environment the evolution of various instabilities towards e.g. pattern formation and self-oscillations has been studied. Recently stable localized structures or cavity solitons have attracted much attention. Besides fundamental aspects their inherent robustness makes them attractive for potential applications in all-optical information processing and storage schemes. Their existence was predicted for different types of cubic nonlinearities as saturable absorptive, saturable focusing and saturable defocusing ones [1-4]. A major result of the these studies consisted in that a saturation of the nonlinearity is an essential prerequisite for the formation stable localized structures. In the focusing case saturation prevents the catastrophic collapse, while in the defocusing case a variety of localized structures of different topology appears near the saturation intensity [4].

© 1998 Optical Society of America