Cavity solitons

Summary form only given. The term soliton is increasingly used for any pulse or beam in which dispersion and/or diffraction is compensated on the average by nonlinearity. For soliton-like structures in optical resonators or cavities, the term cavity soliton is a natural one. Of particular interest are two-dimensional (2D) cavity solitons written in the transverse plane of an optical resonator. Such structures could be natural bits for parallel processing of optical information, especially if they exist and are stable in semiconductor micro-resonators. We will review the many theoretical predictions and the few experimental observations of cavity solitons in the literature.