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Europhysics Letters (EPL)

Scaling laws for localized pattern formation in optical bistability

Mustapha Tlidi, Paul Mandel

Published Nov 15, 1998• 11 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We study the kinetics of transverse pattern formation in a passive ring cavity containing two-level atoms. Parameters are chosen such that the Turing instabilities are on the upper and lower branches of a bistable domain and close to the limit points, so that the interaction between the long-wavelength modes includes the homogeneous mode. This leads to the formation of a localized structure which connects the two stable branches of the homogeneous bistable solution. The kinetics of this pattern formation is described by simple scaling laws.

DOI
10.1209/epl/i1998-00492-x

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We study the kinetics of transverse pattern formation in a passive ring cavity containing two-level atoms. Parameters are chosen such that the Turing instabilities are on the upper and lower branches of a bistable domain and close to the limit points, so that the interaction between the long-wavelength modes includes the homogeneous mode. This leads to the formation of a localized structure which connects the two stable branches of the homogeneous bistable solution. The kinetics of this pattern formation is described by simple scaling laws.
We discuss a novel type of optical instability, which leads to the spontaneous formation of a stationary spatial structure, instead of to the onset of oscillations or pulsations. A passive system is contained in an optical cavity, to which we add two lateral mirrors. Under appropriate conditions, diffraction of radiation can induce the onset of a transverse-stripe structure in an initially uniform plane-wave field configuration. In this paper, we consider the case of a homogeneously broadened two-level system. The model on which our analysis is based is derived from the Maxwell-Bloch equations in the paraxial approximation, using the mean-field limit and assuming a large Fresnel number. We show that, with respect to the bistability parameter C, the threshold of the spatial instability coincides with the bistability threshold for absorptive, resonant optical bistability. The spatial instability requires, however, a detuned configuration and can arise both in the absence and presence of bistability. In the latter case, it can occur both in the lower and in the upper branch of the steady-state curve. The instability is caused by competition between different transverse modes, which realize a situation of spatial coexistence, different from the state of temporal coexistence which characterizes the spontaneous oscillations that arise from the previously known multimode instabilities. Finally, we discuss some points relevant for an experimental observation of this phenomenon.
Two-dimensional (2D) ``chaotic'' localized structures are observed in the transverse profile of light with a delay model of a ring cavity with strongly dispersive two-level atoms. Near nascent optical bistability, the 2D homogeneous solution undergoes a subcritical transition to a spatiotemporal chaos. The inhomogeneous pattern coexisting with the homogeneous solution is filled with large-intensity peaks, oscillating with time. In the subcritical domain, localized structures are observed, with isolated peaks more stable and more coherent than the ones in the filled structure. The order is easily recovered by a filtering procedure that reduces the wave-vector bandwidth.
A ring-cavity system, filled with an isotropic nonlinear medium and driven by a linearly polarized coherent input field, has been the subject of intense study over the last decade. This system can show a number of non-equilibrium phase transitions, including optical bistability (OB), and transverse pattern formation. The instability responsible for pattern formation then simply serves to drive the system from the unstable lower branch to the stable upper branch. This conclusion, however, is based on the assumption that the internal field in the nonlinear ring-cavity preserves its polarization state as that of the input field. Here we extend the mean field model to include polarization effects.>