  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.
