CHAPTER 1 - INTRODUCTION TO OPTICAL BISTABILITY

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of optical bistability. Optical bistability is a rapidly expanding field of research because of its potential application to all-optical logic and because of the interesting phenomena it encompasses. Many bistable devices consist of a nonlinear medium within an optical resonator, just as lasers do; however, passive bistable devices are excited only by the incident coherent light. The counterparts of many phenomena studied in lasers, such as fluctuations, regenerative pulsations, and optical turbulence, can be observed in passive bistable systems, often under better controlled conditions. A system is said to be optically bistable if it has two output states for the same value of the input over some range of input values. There are two reasons for making a strong distinction between optical bistability in passive systems and optical bistability in lasers. First is the guess that passive systems are more likely to become practical because they are simpler and hence are likely to be smaller and require less power. Second, the two fields have evolved independently.