Applied Optics
Optical bistability in fiber ring resonator containing an erbium doped fiber amplifier and quantum dot doped fiber saturable absorber
Sara Tofighi, Somayeh Safari Farshemi, Batool Sajad, Fateme Shahshahani, Ali Reza Bahrampour
Abstract
In this paper we study the optical bistability in a double coupler fiber ring resonator which consists of an erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) in half part of the fiber ring and a quantum dot doped fiber (QDF) saturable absorber in the other half. The bistability is provided by the QDF section of the ring resonator. The EDFA is employed to reduce the switching power. The transmitted and reflected bistability characteristics are investigated. It is shown that the switching power for this new bistable device is less than 10 mW.