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Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE

Optical Logic Elements From Four Level Systems Interacting With Two Fields.

David Kagan, Harry Friedmann

Published Jan 8, 1987• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

A four level system such as found in dyes and F2+ centres of alkali halides is irradiated by two fields in a Fabry-Perot or ring cavity.It is shown that both fields exhibit optical hysteresis and bistability.Applications such as a single element half-adder and tunable optical bistability are described.
DOI
10.1117/12.936940

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The optical behavior of a four-level system in a ring cavity driven by two coherent laser fields is studied. One laser field is treated as the incident field and the other the control field, respectively. It is found that there is optical transparency when the difference between the two frequency detunings of the incident and control fields from the corresponding atomic transition frequencies is zero. Optical bistability can be produced and controlled by increasing the magnitude of the frequency difference. The bistable hysteresis becomes larger when the frequency difference is increased. Further increase of the latter can lead to onset of multistability.
The theory of the optical multistability by two-photon resonant interaction is investigated. The nonlinear medium inside a Fabry-Perot cavity is in two-photon resonance with the laser beam. The two-photon equation of state including dynamical Stark shift and relaxation parameters is obtained and studied under mean-field approximation. The equations for both Fabry-Perot cavity and ring cavity take basically the same form. The physics mechanisms resulting in optical multistability are also studied. It has been shown that the combined effects of Kerr switching and saturation absorption switching can lead to two-photon optical double-bistability, tristability as well as bistability. Furthermore, the criterion conditions under which double-bistability or tristability can occur are given and discussed. Finally, the phase-conjugated reflectivity by two-photon four-wave mixing is also shown to exhibit multistability as well as hysteresis.
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