Cavity soliton laser based on a VCSEL with saturable absorber

In this Chapter we intend to make a review on our work on cavity solitons in semiconductor lasers with saturable absorbers, with a special attention to the most recent results.We study theoretically a broad-area vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) with a saturable absorber, and show numerically the existence of cavity solitons in the system: they exist as solitary structures superposed on a background with zero intensity. Therefore, this system can work as a cavity soliton laser, ensuring maximum contrast and compactness of the device, in comparison with other systems supporting cavity solitons. In particular, in absence of a holding beam, these solitons do not rely on a proper phase of the addressing pulses to be either created or deleted.We also show that the properties of the system are deeply influenced by the radiative recombination of carriers. Taking into account this process, the existence of solitons is shown numerically for a choice of parameters suitable to describe real devices, where the same material is used for the active and the passive parts. Furthermore, we compare three different switching techniques for the control of cavity solitons in a VCSEL based cavity soliton laser, one incoherent and the other two semicoherent with different injection frequencies. We show that the switching dynamics and energies can be very different depending on the type of injection. Finally, we show that in a cavity soliton laser based on a VCSEL with a saturable absorber the solitons can spontaneously move if the ratio of the carrier lifetimes in the amplifier and in the absorber takes appropriate values. The direction of the motion is arbitrary, while its velocity is determined by the parameters of the system. In devices with a finite cross section the CS describes different trajectories depending on the shape of the boundary of the pumped region. For a circular pump the CS moves on circular trajectories along the boundary. This dynamical regime can be exploited to create controllable trains of pulses, together with frequency and amplitude modulation.