Rotating and Fugitive Cavity Solitons in semiconductor microresonators

We describe two different methods that exploit the intrinsic mobility properties of cavity solitons to realize periodic motion, suitable in principle to provide soliton-based, all-optical clocking or synchronization. The first method relies on the drift of solitons in phase gradients: when the holding beam corresponds to a doughnut mode (instead of a Gaussian as usually) cavity solitons undergo a rotational motion along the annulus of the doughnut. The second makes additional use of the recently discovered spontaneous motion of cavity solitons induced by the thermal dynamics, it demonstrates that it can be controlled by introducing phase or amplitude modulations in the holding beam. Finally, we show that in presence of a weak 2D phase modulation, the cavity soliton, under the thermally induced motion, performs a random walk from one maximum of the phase profile to another, always escaping from the temperature minimum generated by the soliton itself (Fugitive Soliton).