The shift to the all-optical signal processing is highly desirable in order to speed up internet and telecommunications. As a consequence, there is an urgent need for generation of stable temporal optical solitons as information carriers in telecommunication, as well as of spatial and spatiotemporal solitons for all-optical signal processing. Process of all-optical switching can be associated with the evolution of different types of spatial optical solitons and the interactions between them. Dissipative solitons, preserving during propagation their shape, appear as stable solutions in this class of systems.

Spatiotemporal solitons, or ‘‘light bullets’’ are self-organized whenever the dispersion and diffraction are counter-balanced by saturating nonlinearity of the medium and appropriate gains match linear and nonlinear losses. We established the stability of one-, two-, and three-dimensional dissipative solitons analyzing the multidimensional complex cubic-quintic Ginzburg-Landau equation (CQGLE) (V. Skarka, et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 013903 (2006). For the first time, we elucidated the mechanism for the generation of localized optical vortex solitons (LOVS) in optical materials with cubic-quintic nonlinearity (V. Skarka, et al., Phys. Rev. B 81, 035202 (2010)). We found novel stable dissipative vortical solitons in Ginzburg-Landau media with radially inhomogeneous losses (see Fig. 1d) V. Skarka, et al., Physical Review Letters 105, 213901 (2010)). Several novel kinds of localized vortices are found, including spinning elliptically shaped ones, eccentric elliptic vortices which feature double rotation, spinning crescents, and breathing vortices.

Waveguide arrays are being used to enable light coupling, modify propagation of light, and induce nonlinearities. They are produced in the bulk of appropriate materials by using direct laser writing. We are using our own direct laser writing system to generate surface waveguide structures in home-made materials like dichromated pullulan and tothema sensitized gelatin. It is our intention to use femtosecond laser for intravolume writing of waveguides.