Influence of nonlocal interactions on the formation and stability of cavity solitons

Cavity solitons (CSs) are controllable two-dimensional transverse localized structures in optical cavities. Due to recent advances in the field of metamaterials, it is possible to control the diffraction strength by adding a left-handed material layer in a Fabry-Perot resonator together with a traditional nonlinear material. This possibility to engineer the diffraction strength allows for bringing the system into conditions where the nonlocal response of the left-handed material starts to dominate the nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamics. We show that the linear nonlocal interaction between the optical field and the material manifestly changes the stability of these CSs. In our study, we focus on a resonator with a Kerr-type nonlinearity, in which two types of CSs can be formed. On the one hand, CSs can be associated to the coexistence of sub-critical patterns and a homogeneous solution, while on the other hand they can also be associated to the coexistence of two homogeneous solutions. In both cases, we study the impact of changing the diffraction strength on the domains of existence and stability of CSs. For the second type of CSs, we complement our research with investigating the influence of nonlocality on the movement of domain walls, which determines the formation of these spatial structures.