Beyond the Size Limit on Cavity Solitons with Left-Handed Materials

We propose a technique to produce cavity solitons with arbitrarily small diameter by placing a nonlinear left-handed material in a Fabry-Perot resonator together with a traditional nonlinear material. This configuration allows engineering the diffraction strength. Considering the typical nonlocal behaviour of the nano-structured left-handed metamaterial, we develop a mean-field model describing the spatiotemporal evolution of this system. We focus our numerical studies on the influence of the nonlocality on the size and linear stability of these localised structures as the diffraction strength is decreased. A minimal width beyond the diffraction limit is discovered and applications are discussed.