We propose a hybrid soliton-based system consisting of a centrosymmetric photorefractive crystal, supporting photorefractive solitons, coupled to a vertical cavity surface emitting laser, supporting multistable cavity solitons. The composite nature of the system, which couples a propagative/conservative field dynamics to a stationary/dissipative one, allows to observe a more general and unified system phenomenology and to conceive novel photonic functionalities. The potential of the proposed hybrid system becomes clear when investigating the generation and control of cavity solitons by propagating a plane wave through electro-activated solitonic waveguides in the crystal. By changing the electro-activation voltage of the crystal, we prove that cavity solitons can be turned on and shifted with controlled velocity across the device section. The scheme can be exploited for applications to optical information encoding and processing.
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