Dissipative Light Bullets and 3D Breathers in a Passive Coherently Driven Multimode Kerr Cavity

In nonlinear optics, a three-dimensional localized light wave, known as light bullet (LB), may emerge due to the interaction between nonlinearity, diffraction, and dispersion. Steady-state LBs are long-standing challenges because of wave collapse [1]. This may be arrested by different mechanisms, such as saturable, competing nonlinearities [2], twisted lattices [3], and graded refractive index (GRIN) distributions [4]. For dissipative cases, such as multimode fiber lasers, LBs may also be stabilized by saturable absorbers and external phase modulations [5]. In externally driven (i.e., passive) cavities, phase modulation can be introduced by intracavity synchronous modulators [7], and lead to a temporal trapping potential, as recently demonstrated for the case of 1D solitons [8] and 3D settings [9]. Here we show the existence of stable LBs and 3D breathers in a coherently driven, passive multimode Kerr cavity with a three-dimensional potential.