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Applied Physics Letters

Optical bistability and nonlinear switching due to increasing absorption in single-crystal ZnSe waveguides

B. G. Kim, E. Garmire, N. Shibata, Sakae Zembutsu

Published Aug 17, 1987• 33 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Optical nonlinear switching and bistability due to increasing absorption have been observed in single-crystal ZnSe waveguides with contrast ratios of 16/1 and switching times of 10 μs at 15 mW of argon laser light. Switching energy is improved over the bulk by a factor of 200.
DOI
10.1063/1.98398

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The switching dynamics of thermally induced optical bistability in ZnSe nonlinear interference filters is investigated experimentally and theoretically. The device, maintained on its low transmission level by a cw argon laser beam, is switched on its high transmission level by an external light pulse. Either a very fast switching or an important slowing down are obtained when the holding cw intensity or the switching pulse energy are well chosen. This variation of the switching times is analyzed theoretically and observed experimentally.
Prism coupling of an argon laser into a ZnS waveguide was investigated for power slew rates much less than the nonlinearity relaxation time. The asymmetries and switching as a function of coupling conditions predicted by Carter and Chen1 are demonstrated clearly for the first time, we believe. In addition we also observed increasing absorption bistability2 in conditions consistent with the angular switching results but different from those in which bistability has been previously reported in ZnS waveguides.3
In this paper we present our investigations concerning thermally induced optical bistability (OB) in CdS and ZnSe. With CdS platelet type single crystals basic boolean functions are realized. The possibilities of cascadability and parallelity of the information processing and the switching dynamics of the system are examined. Further on the effect of optical noise upon the switching process and the instable branch of the hysteresis loop are measured. In ZnSe both absorptive and dispersive OB are observed. An efficient opto-electric modulator is built using the photothermal SEED-effect.
The excitonic nonlinearities in II-VI wide gap semiconductors have recently become an interesting research topic. Andersen et al.1 studied the saturating absorption of excitonic resonance in ZnSe single crystal films and (Zn, Mn)Se superlattices, which they attributed to Coulombic screening for the case of ZnSe film or a wide-well (Zn,Mn)Se quantum well structure at 77 K, and the Coulombic screening and phase space filling for a narrow-well structure. Gribkovskii et al.2 have observed the increase of excitonic absorption optical bistability in ZnSe film and attributed it to excitonic broadening and gap renormalization for the nonlinear mechanism. We report the first observation of optical bistability in ZnSe/ZnS MQWs grown by MOCVD on CaF2 substrates.