Cavity solitons in lasers with spatially modulated injected signal

The authors present an alternative to rocking that leads to the same type of behaviour, namely the appearance of bistable phase locking and, in the case of large Fresnel number lasers, to stable (phase bistable) cavity solitons and extended patterns. The new type of injection we present here is monochromatic, unlike usual rocking, but it is spatially modulated across the transverse plane of the cavity, so that its sign varies periodically, or even randomly, in space.