Stable spatial solitons in semiconductor optical amplifiers

Summary form only given. It has been experimentally and theoretically, proved in the temporal case (recirculating fiber loop with SOA) that saturable absorbers (SA) can stabilize the propagation and lead to the formation of stable dissipative temporal solitons. We take advantage of these findings and propose here to mimic saturable absorbers by unpumped regions (periodically patterned electrodes). We model the field (/spl psi/) and carrier density (N) evolution by using a paraxial wave equation with resonant semiconductor nonlinearities coupled to a carrier diffusion equation that includes spontaneous and Auger recombination.