Cavity solitons in broad-area vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers below threshold

Cavity solitons are stationary self-organized bright intensity peaks which form over a homogeneous back-ground
in the section of broad area radiation beams. They are generated by shining a writing/erasing laser pulse
into a nonlinear optical cavity, driven by a holding beam. The ability to control their location and their motion
by introducing phase or amplitude gradients in the holding beam makes them interesting as mobile pixels for
all-optical processing units. We show the generation of a number of cavity solitons in broad-area vertical cavity
semiconductor microresonators electrically pumped above transparency but slightly below threshold. We ana-lyze
the switching process in details. The observed spots can be written, erased, and manipulated as indepen-dent
objects, as predicted by the theoretical model. An especially tailored one is used to simulate the studied
phenomena and to compare our simulations to the experimental findings with good agreement.