Multistable Spatial Solitons in SemiconductorResonators

Direct semiconductors, as e.g. AlGaAs, exhibit huge nonlinearities for photonenergies slightly below the fundamental band edge. We show that in this domain persistent brightsolitary waves can emerge in a planar resonator. Their existence could pave the way towards anhighly parallel all-optical information processing and storage scheme. The formation of solitarywaves is primarily due to saturation of a defocusing nonlinearity, diffusion and inducedabsorption. Saturation is evoked by prominent many-particle effects like screening and band fillingwhereas the induced absorption stems from the gap renormalization. It turns out that solitarywaves of different topology may exist for the same detuning, thus representing a kind ofmultistability.