Modern Physics Letters B
CRITICAL EXPONENTS AND CRITICAL SLOWING DOWN IN OPTICAL BISTABILITY — A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH
Pei-Hsi Tsao, Wei-Chih Liu
Abstract
A phenomenological approach is adopted for investigating the critical behavior related to optical bistability (OB). This method is similar to Landau theory of critical phenomena and is applied to find the critical exponents and to analyze critical slowing down. It is shown in general that critical exponents for OB are classical ones and the relaxation time of critical slowing down varies with the external parameter p as (p − pc)−1/2 around the transition point p = pc.