The movie illustrates manipulation of cavity solitons in a VCSEL with feedback from a volume Bragg grating. The solitons are self-localized but pinned to specific locations by device inhomogeneities. Depending on where the writing beam (intense bright spot) is with respect to these "traps", solitons can be ignited, dragged around and possibly erased if they can't reenter the trap after detaching from the writing beam. The writing beam in moved across the VCSEL aperture to "stirr" the solitons at different locations.
The duplicated structures in the lower left are an artefact of the imaging system.
Courtesy of N. Radwell.

See movie: 0.9 Mb mwv movie