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Applied Physics Letters

Optical bistability using a magneto-optic modulator

Shinsuke Umegaki, Hiroaki Inoue, Toshihiko T. Yoshino

Published May 15, 1981• 15 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Optical bistability is realized using a Faraday rotator which has a high rotating power owing to multiple reflections in a planar glass plate. The linearly polarized light is modulated by the coil current of the electromagnet. Optical hysteresis is observed when the current is changed in proportion to the intensity of the light transmitted through the modulator. An application of this device to stabilizing the light intensity of the cw laser intensity is described.

DOI
10.1063/1.92149

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Chinese Physics Letters•Sep 1, 1993•0 citations
Optical bistability is realized using a Faraday rotator which has a high rotating power owing to multiple reflections in a planar glass plate. The linearly polarized light is modulated by the coil current of the electromagnet. Optical hysteresis is observed when the current is changed in proportion to the intensity of the light transmitted through the modulator. An application of this device to stabilizing the light intensity of the cw laser intensity is described.
Abstract An optical bistable device can be useful not only for optical memory but also for optical sensing by using its binary signal process characteristics. In this case, if a nonlinear Faraday medium is used in the optical bistable device, some interesting features can be obtained as already shown by the present author. Those unique characteristics are that, by controlling the polarization direction by an external magnetic field, a multiple interference can also be controlled not only by the phase associated with an optical path variation but also the polarization direction. This paper describes a theoretical analysis of the fluctuation of transmission and reflection as a function of an absorption in a medium besides the incident intensity reduction and discusses the bistability characteristics and the threshold values against the parameters. It is shown that the control of the bistable function, the realization of a low threshold value, and the increase of a discontinuous power variation ratio (= optical intensity ratio between on and off in the binary signal process) at the threshold value are accomplished as the result of the introduction of the external magnetic field control method. Therefore, it can be concluded that a Faraday medium is very useful for an optical bistable device.
When the output parameter of an optical device could be a multivalued function of the input parameter, this device can be working in an optical bistable status. The most typical optical bistable device is a Fabry–Perot cavity containing a nonlinear optical medium, the refractive index of which depends on the light intensity. Upon the action of an intense input optical beam, the transmitted (or reflected) intensity of this device may exhibit a nonlinear response to the incident light intensity variation and, especially under appropriate working conditions, the characteristic output/input curve may manifest a single (or multiple) hysteresis loop(s). Such type of optical bistable device can be used as an optical differential amplifier, optical switch, optical limiter, optical clipper, optical discriminator, or an optical memory element, depending on the chosen nonlinear medium and operation conditions.
We proposed an all-optical bistable unit made of a Faraday medium and investigated theoretically its unique characteristics. Optical bistability in our proposed unit was experimantally confirmed. In this paper, using a 830 nm wavelength laser diode and a thin garnet film rotator as a Fabry-Perot resonator, optical bistability is confirmed again. Bistable characteristics, threshold incident power, on-off power ratio, and dynamic characteristics, are examined to attain controllability with the external magnetic field. In our proposed unit's construction, an all-optical sensing device (a magnetic field sensor) is proposed and evaluated for application to the OB operation.