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Motionless domain walls representing connecting temporal or spatial orbits typically exist only for very specific parameters, around the so-called Maxwell point. This report introduces a novel mechanism for stabilizing temporal domain walls away from this peculiar equilibrium, opening up new possibilities to encode information in dynamical systems. It is based on antiperiodic regimes in a delayed system close to a bistable situation, leading to a cancellation of the average drift velocity. The results are demonstrated in a normal form model and experimentally in a laser with optical injection and delayed feedback. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is shown that the ‘flower-like’ emission patterns along the perimeter of broad-area circular vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers can be interpreted in a first approximation as annular standing waves. Their modulation period follows the dispersion relation of tilted plane waves for a plano-planar cavity. For high enough divergence angle, they show a very peculiar polarization behavior of radial polarization in near field and azimuthal polarization in far field. The polarization selection is qualitatively explained by the breaking of the isotropy between s- and p-components for waves propagating off axis in the Bragg reflectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dynamics of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers with isotropic optical feedback from a distant reflector is studied experimentally and numerically. Low-frequency fluctuations with sudden drop-outs of power are found to be qualitatively independent of the amount of excitation of the second polarization component. The latter is shown to be controlled to a great extent by the intrinsic dichroism of the solitary laser. The experimental findings are in very good qualitative agreement with simulations. The characteristic features of a doublet in the radio-frequency spectra around the external-cavity round-trip frequency are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

First experimental investigations are reported on nonlinear beam shaping due to the interaction between an intense laser beam and a cloud of laser cooled rubidium atoms. Resonant excitation of the F = 3 ↔ F' = 4 hyperfine transition is considered. The single-pass interaction through the cold vapor causes an increase in the laser beam intensity in the forward direction (zero transverse wavevector component) when observed in Fourier space, for sufficiently high values of saturation. A qualitative explanation of the observations based on a two-level model for a resonantly excited transition proves acceptable. The observations are compatible with an interpretation based on nonlinear index-induced focusing of an incident beam with curved wavefront, as is used in z-sean measurements. Simple physical considerations allow us to deduce the conditions for the observability of optical patterns in the beam transmitted by a cold atomic cloud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze the potential for the spin manipulation of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) by operating them electrically and injecting additional spin-polarized carriers by polarized optical excitation. The output polarization of the VCSELs can be easily controlled by the spin orientation of the optically injected carriers when the injection current does not exceed the threshold current. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]