Dissipative Light Bullets in Passively Mode-Locked Semiconductor Lasers

We demonstrate the existence of stable three dimensional dissipative localized structures in the output of a laser coupled to a distant saturable absorber. These phase invariant light bullets are individually addressable and can be envisioned for three dimensional optical information storage. An effective theory provides for an intuitive picture and allows to relate their formation to the morphogenesis of static auto-solitons and cellular patterns. The complexity incurred by the widely different time scales present in the problem as well as by non-local couplings that stem from the material degrees of freedom is circumvented by the use of a multiple time-scale analysis. This provides a powerful model enabling to tackle effectively the three dimensional case.