Bistable optical switching by the incident angle

Rosie Cush

The control beam intensity required to switch a multibeam, cascadable Fabry–Perot bistable device may be minimised by varying the beam incident angle.

Nasser N. Peyghambarian, H. M. Gibbs, Daniele Hulin +3 more

A. S. B. Sombra

Peng Hou, Yuanyuan Chen, Xi Chen +2 more

It is found that there exists a hysteretic response between the incident intensity and the lateral shift for a one-dimensional photonic crystal containing a nonlinear defect. The lateral shift can be greatly enhanced when the incident intensity decreases from a value higher than the switch-up threshold of optical bistability and reaches the maximum at the switch-down threshold. It is also found that the hysteresis is strongly dependent on the nonlinear defect, the incident angle, and the incident frequency. The validity of the theoretical analysis is demonstrated by numerical simulations for a Gaussian beam.

B. C. Svensson, G. Assanto, D. Kuchibhatla +3 more

Utilizing prism coupling of an argon laser beam into a nonlinear ZnS waveguide we have observed power-dependent optical bistability. We detuned the incidence angle by several linewidths from the optimal low power efficiency case. At this position we observed switching and hysteresis and verified the hysteresis loop to be bistable. The origin of the bistability we tentatively identified as a combination of intensity-dependent absorption and dispersion. Our conditions for bistability were different from those of W. Lukosz et al. in OPTICAL BISTABILITY III (Springer-Verlag, New York, 1986), p. 109.

A. Daunois, J.‐Y. Bigot