We report the observation of transverse and whole-beam optical bistability in thin uncoated cadmium sulfide platelets at milliwatt power levels when a laser is tuned to the vicinity of a bound exciton resonance. The characteristics of both processes are quite different and are described separately.
Very large nonlinearities are observed in the vicinity of a bound exciton resonance in cadmium sulfide. Power levels of the order of 8 μW are sufficient for saturating the bound exciton resonance in a tight focusing geometry. In a more loosely focused geometry, power levels of the order of 250 μW are sufficient for saturating the bound exciton resonance and for observing optical bistability. Transverse effects are found to play a very important role. For all our measurements, no thermal contributions to the nonlinearity were observed. Since thermal effects are not playing a role and since the studied bound excitons decay radiatively in 500 psec, we infer subnanosecond switchoff and cycling times.
Self-defocusing of ordinary and extraordinary laser beams have been investigated in cadmium sulfide semiconductors in the near-band-edge absorption region. First it has been shown experimentally, that effects of the anisotropy nonlinear refraction induced by charge carriers created by single photon absorption is described whole set components of the third order nonlinear susceptibility tensor. New type of transverse optical bistability with increased amout of feedback due to nonlinear anisotropy was demonstrated.