Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
Theoretical analysis of the optical bistability with Faraday effect
Masao Hirano
Abstract
We have proposed and discussed that an introduction of the Faraday medium to the optical bistable devices brings new and good characteristics on the application to optical sensing. In this paper, characteristics of the optical bistability are analyzed theoretically for the optical bistable operation with the Faraday effect, the threshold power, and several parameter dependences of the characteristic. Consequently, by controlling them with an external magnetic field which is an operatable factor, the optical bistability shows much usefulness and effectiveness by the following points: the controllability of the bistable operation, the reduction in the threshold power, and the enlargement in the discontinuous power variation ratio.