Genesis of walking optical solitons in semiconductor lasers by nonlinear spatio-spectral pulse-trapping

Summary form only given. Semiconductor lasers are nonlinear media in which the dynamic light-matter interaction occurring on timescales ranging from femtosecond to the nanosecond regime lead to characteristic spatial and spectral properties of the charge carrier plasma and the optical fields. Depending on the geometry of the active layer, injection current or spatio-spectral properties of an injected light beam the distributions of the charge carrier plasma and of the intensity can either reach a chaotic regime or stabilize. We present results of numerical simulations of an amplifier configuration in which the spatio-spectral mixing of two short optical pulses in the active area of a broad-area laser lead to the formation of a walking optical solitons. The origin of the observed behavior can be attributed to spatial effects such as carrier transport, diffraction and self-focusing and in particular to the microscopic dynamics in the carrier system reflecting the spatio-spectral gain and refractive index dynamics. The spatio-temporal dynamics of the optical fields and the carrier system is calculated with Maxwell-Bloch-Langevin equations which consider the wave-mixing process as well as the carrier heating and relaxation processes on a microscopic level.