Pattern formation in optical resonators

Abstract

We review pattern formation in optical resonators. The emphasis is on 'particle-like' structures such as vortices or spatial solitons. On the one hand, similarities impose themselves with other fields of physics (condensed matter, phase transitions, particle physics, fluds/super fluids). On the other hand the feedback is led by the resonator mirrors to bi-and multi-stability of the spatial field structure, which is the basic ingredient for optical information processing.The spatial dimension or the 'parallelism' is the strength of optics compared to electronics (and will have to be employed to fully use the advantages optics offers in information processing). But even in the 'serial' processing tasks of telecoms (e.g. information buffering) spatial resonator solitons can do better than the schemes proposed so far-including 'slow light'.Pattern formation in optical resonators will likely be the key to brain-like information processing like cognition, learning and association; to complement the precise but limited algorithmic capabilities of electronic processing. But even in the short term it will be useful for solving serial optical processing problems.The prospects for technical uses of pattern formation in resonators are one motivation for this research. The fundamental similarities with other fields of physics, on the other hand, inspire transfer of concepts between fields; something that has always proven fruitful for gaining deeper insights or for solving technical problems.

Dissipative solitons

“…In this way we choose the point of view of DSs developed in Section 1. For more details and further reading we refer to various review articles and books that each have their value in certain subareas [241,243,245,246,[249][250][251][252][253][254]. Insight into recent activities in the field of LSs and DSs in optical systems can be obtained from [255].…”

Chapter 6 Fundamentals and Applications of Spatial Dissipative Solitons in Photonic Devices

“…We have tried, however, to present a fair and reasonably comprehensive list of relevant references. We already mentioned some reviews of earlier work: more recent relevant reviews, monographs and special issues include (Staliunas and Sánchez-Morcillo (2003); Drummond et al (2004); Mandel and Tlidi (2004); Akhmediev and Ankiewicz (2005a); Weiss and Larionova (2005); Residori (2005); Akhmediev and Ankiewicz (2008)). Some information can be also found on the website of the FunFACS project (IST-STREP 004868, 2005.…”

“…The setups were based on dye gain media and bacteriorhodopsin saturable absorber or photorefractive nonlinearities. A review summarizing much of this nice work on non-semiconductor systems is given in (Weiss and Larionova, 2005).…”

Plasma induced patterning of polydimethylsiloxane surfaces

“…Materials and substrates with engineered surface patterns are used extensively for applications in electronic [1], optical [2], magnetic [3,4], chemical [5], and biological [6,7] devices and materials. In particular, surfaces with patterned chemical functionalities can serve as templates for directed self-assembly of nanoparticles [8,9], biomolecules, and antibodies [10,11], and are employed in the development of micro-scale biochip and sensor devices.…”