Digest on Nonlinear Optics: Materials, Phenomena and Devices
Second-order Phase Transition At The Critical Point Of Optical Bistability Due To Nonlinear Absorption
Fa Ou
Abstract
Critical phenomena in optical bistability (OB) are studied in details. Theoretical analyses, mainly based on the steady solution of the "thermodynamic" Fokker-Plank equation for absorptive OB, show that the critical phenomena in OB also can be brought into the framework of Landau's theory of second-order phase transitions, and the relations between different kinds of critical index numbers obey the scaling laws.