A hybrid soliton-based system: generation and steering of cavity solitons by means of photorefractive soliton electro-activation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid photonic system combining a photorefractive crystal and a VCSEL to generate and steer cavity solitons, enabling advanced optical control for information processing.

Contribution

It demonstrates a novel hybrid system that allows generation and electro-activation-based control of cavity solitons within a unified photonic platform.

Findings

Cavity solitons can be generated and manipulated via electro-activation.

Changing the voltage shifts and controls soliton position and velocity.

The system offers potential for optical information encoding and processing.

Abstract

We propose a hybrid soliton-based system consisting of a centrosymmetric photorefractive crystal, supporting photorefractive solitons, coupled to a vertical cavity surface emitting laser, supporting multistable cavity solitons. The composite nature of the system, which couples a propagative/conservative field dynamics to a stationary/dissipative one, allows to observe a more general and unified system phenomenology and to conceive novel photonic functionalities. The potential of the proposed hybrid system becomes clear when investigating the generation and control of cavity solitons by propagating a plane wave through electro-activated solitonic waveguides in the crystal. By changing the electro-activation voltage of the crystal, we prove that cavity solitons can be turned on and shifted with controlled velocity across the device section. The scheme can be exploited for applications to optical information encoding and processing.