FORMATION AND CONTROL OF LOCALIZED STRUCTURES IN NONLINEAR-OPTICAL SYSTEMS

Diffractive effects in passive nonlinear optical resonators can lead t o pattern-forming instabilities. When the pattern (in our case, a regu lar hexagonal lattice of intensity peaks) coexists with the homogeneou s solution, soliton-like intensity peaks in the transverse plane can b e excited. These solutions have the characteristics of localized struc tures and are highly degenerate with respect to the peak location. By injecting narrow laser pulses, it is possible to turn on such peaks at desired locations and to turn them off selectively. The conditions to ensure independence among the peaks are described as well. These feat ures suggest the possibility of encoding optical information in the st ructure of the field profile. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.