Abstract

Dissipative solitons (DS), also called localized structures, have attracted a strong attention in the last twenty years in laser systems [1]. Because they appear in systems kept out of equilibrium by a continuous flow of energy that counteracts the losses, DS exhibit very different properties with respect to their conservative counterparts where conservative nonlinearities balances for the spreading induced by dispersion. Dissipative Solitons are attractors, i.e. stable solutions towards which the system will evolve spontaneously from a wide set of initial conditions. Dissipative Solitons rely on the coexistence between different emission states and can be individually addressed by an optical perturbation, hence allowing to use them as bits of information and to implement several information-processing functionalities at an all-optical level.

© 2015 IEEE