Applied Physics Letters

Bistable lasing in twin microdisk photonic molecules

Satoru Ishii, Toshihiko Baba

Published Oct 21, 2005• 63 citations

Abstract

We demonstrate the bistable lasing in a photonic molecule consisting of twin microdisks. When the photonic molecule was nonuniformly photopumped, the bistability and/or mode switching were observed with an effective pump power of <100μW. The rate equation analysis indicated that the operation was based on saturable absorption and gain switching, which depended on the nonuniformity, disk diameter detuning, and Q factors of coupled modes. Such a bistable laser, particularly showing the mode switching, will be applied for ultrasmall high-speed optical memories, flip-flops, and so on.

DOI: 10.1063/1.2120906

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