Abstract

Spatially localized structures in nonlinear optical cavities, including Kerr resonators, optical parametric oscillators, saturable media and second harmonic generation, have attracted a large amount of attention in the last years. In particular, the existence of localized structures (LS) in nonlinear optical cavities have been recently shown [1, 2, 3]. These narrow soliton-like structures exist for a quite broad range of values of the pump for which there is bistability between two equivalent homogeneous solutions. Here we show the existence of a novel kind of stable localized structures, the stable droplets (SD) which have a much larger size and which are in fact large stable circular domain walls connecting the two homogeneous solutions.

© 2002 Optical Society of America