Tunable all-optical bistability in a semiconductor quantum dot damped by a phase-dependent reservoir

Abstract

We propose a method of frequency and phase control of optical bistability in a unidirectional ring cavity containing a semiconductor structure which is characterized as a ladder three-level system. The system interacts with a coherent probe field, and a control field which consists of a strong coherent field and a weak amplitude-fluctuating stochastic field. A perturbative solution of the master equation of the system allows to eliminate the stochastic field and provides a physical picture in terms of correlation properties of the stochastic field. We find that the bistable response can be modified strongly by means of the amplitude, the frequency and the phase of the stochastic field. In order to illustrate the feasibility of the results, we use parameter values corresponding to an semiconductor quantum dot (QD). This investigation may be used to optimize and control the optical switching process in the QD solid-state system, which is much more practical than that in atomic systems.