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Applied Physics Letters

Optical bistability and differential gain between 85 and 296 °K in a Fabry-Perot containing ruby

Thirumalai Venkatesan, S. L. McCall

Published Mar 15, 1977• 124 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Bistability, differential gain, discriminator, clipper, and limier actions were observed using a plano-concave Fabry-Perot cavity containing ruby. Input powers were approximately 20 mW from a cw ruby laser. Operation wa anticipated near 77 °K where the R1 transition was nearly resonant with the laser. However, the device functioned at room temperature. The refractive index of ruby depends on the fractional ground-state population. Driving the R lines leads to a nonlinear refractive index due to dispersive contributions from nonresonant pump and charge-transfer bands, which explains the room-temperature operation.

DOI
10.1063/1.89368

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Bistability, differential gain, discriminator, clipper, and limier actions were observed using a plano-concave Fabry-Perot cavity containing ruby. Input powers were approximately 20 mW from a cw ruby laser. Operation wa anticipated near 77 °K where the R1 transition was nearly resonant with the laser. However, the device functioned at room temperature. The refractive index of ruby depends on the fractional ground-state population. Driving the R lines leads to a nonlinear refractive index due to dispersive contributions from nonresonant pump and charge-transfer bands, which explains the room-temperature operation.
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 demonstrate optically bistable (light switching light) operation in a room-temperature InGaAsP Fabry-Perot amplifier. The amplifier is an InGaAsP/InP laser structure biased at ~95% of its lasing threshold. It is switched with <3 μW of optical power provided by the mechanically chopped output of a quasi-single-mode InGaAsP/InP laser. The experimental apparatus is depicted in Fig, 1. A change in the refractive Index in the amplifier of only 5 × 10−4 is sufficient to cause switching. Input and output pulses from the nonlinear amplifier are shown in Fig. 2 when the source frequency is initially detuned by 14 GHz from the closest Fabry-Perot mode of the amplifier. Smaller switching powers are required at lesser detunings. The physical mechanism of the intensity-dependent change of the refractive index is thought to be the change in carrier density resulting from stimulated recombination of free carriers.
The real and imaginary parts of the complex index of refraction have been measured in the R1 line of optically pumped ruby. The experiments, which employed a temperature-controlled, single-mode ruby laser as a variable-frequency monochromatic source, were performed near liquid-nitrogen temperature, where the R1 doublet structure is well resolved. R1 absorption profiles were measured for several optical-pumping conditions, ranging from zero up to a pump power that excited a population in the 2E state equal to about 60% of the population of the 4A2 ground state. For each pumping condition, the anomalous-dispersion curve was measured interferometrically. The spectral profiles of the absorption coefficient and the anomalous dispersion display a dependence on the optical-pumping conditions that is more complicated than simple saturation of the R1 transitions, but for given pumping conditions the two quantities are correlated as predicted by the Kramers–Kronig relations.
In this letter we describe and demonstrate the optically bistable operation of an all-optical nonlinear Fabry-Perot etalon (NLFP) in which the power-dependent cavity phase shift has a contri- bution dependent upon the internal cavity power and a contribution directly dependent upon the power incident on the cavity. When the contributions have the same parity, the optically-bistable behavior is essentially the same as that seen in the now standard bistable NLFP (counterclockwise hysteresis in transmission). For opposite parity there is a range of relative strengths for which bistable operation cannot be obtained, but outside of that range bistable behavior having clockwise hysteresis in transmission is possible. We present a demonstration of this latter bistable behavior in which the NLFP was a GaAlAs laser diode amplifier driven by a similar diode laser. Low-frequency mod- ulation of the laser power by direct variation of the laser drive current produced a small shift in laser wavelength proportional to the laser power, providing the cavity phase shift term proportional to the inci- dent power, while the nonlinear refractive index of the NLFP provided the phase shift proportional to the transmitted power.
We report the realisation of optically bistable switching and memory elements, and the transphasor Can all-optical transistor) in simple one element nonlinear Fabry-Perot interferometers made from the semiconductor InSb. These devices, which operate at 5 K and 77 K with mW powers from a cw CO laser between 5 and 6 μm rely on a strongly intensity-dependent refractive index discovered near the bandgap region of InSb and explained by bandgap resonant saturation. Switching speeds are shown to be < 500 ns in these first devices and operation to much shorter timescales is predicted. Operation at room temperature and in other semiconductors at other wavelengths remains a possibility and such devices offer considerable potential for all-optical switching in integrated optics and laser pulse control.