Solitons and vortices in lasers

We give in this article the mathematical background for pattern formation in nonlinear active resonators, elucidating the relation of optics with other fields of physics, and demonstrate experimentally the existence, properties, and dynamics of:(i) vortices in lasers,(ii) bright spatial solitons in lasers with saturable absorber, and(iii) spatial solitons in degenerate parametric mixing.All these structures are by definition bistable so that they are potentially useful for parallel optical information processing.