Cavity solitons in semiconductor resonators: role of many-particle effects

Summary form only given. Owing to their robustness and potential applications in all-optical information transmission, processing, and storage schemes, there is growing interest in optical solitons. Recently, it was shown that bright solitons can exist in semiconductor Fabry-Perot resonators at accessible power levels. These cavity solitons or soliton pixels may serve as basic units in information storage systems because they can be easily and individually set and erased. In previous studies, it was assumed that the photon energy is near the exciton resonance. For these energy levels and high carrier densities, an effective two-level system approach that relates the complex susceptibility changes linearly to the carrier density is appropriate. If one reduces the photon energy further, many-particle effects come into play, and the linear dependence ceases to hold. In this work, we use an appropriate, phenomenological material model that accounts for all prominent many-particle effects such as exciton formation, screening, gap renormalization, and band filling. It turns out that the diversity of soliton structures is richer than previously demonstrated.