Optical bistability in the interaction of light with activated crystals in a cavity

Michael Scalora, Joseph W. Haus, C. M. Bowden

P. Grinberg, Philippe Hamel, Maia Brunstein +4 more

We show both theoretically and experimentally that the lifetime of an active semiconductor photonic crystal nanocavity is enhanced thanks to the combination of two cooperative effects: slow light propagation based on coherent-population-oscillation effect and optical bistability. In particular we develop an analytical analysis enabling us to clearly show the physical mechanisms producing the enhancement of the cavity lifetime.

A. Brodin, Sergey A. Boiko, Mykhailo Ya. Valakh +1 more

Abstract Polarization optical bistability (POB) in crystals with FA‐centers mounted into a Fabry‐Perrot cavity is analysed. This type of optical bistability is caused by amplification of fluctuations of light polarization in crystals under consideration and has no threshold on radiation intensity. The range of parameters is found for impure crystals and cavity under POB conditions.

J. Goll, Hermann Haken

Songqing Tang, Mengjiao Ren, Zhiheng Li +2 more

This article theoretically proposes a multi-layer Fabry-Perot cavity structure based on nonlinear MoS2, whose cavity is composed of asymmetric photonic crystals. In this structure, we observed a low threshold optical bistability phenomenon on the order of a in the visible light band, which is caused by the large third-order nonlinear conductivity of the bilayer MoS2 and the Fabry-Perot cavity resonance. Research has found that when light is incident from two different directions in an asymmetric Fabry-Perot cavity, the optical bistability exhibits not exactly the same behavior. In addition, we further investigated and found that the optical bistability behavior in this simple multi-layer structure is closely related to parameters such as incident wavelength, Fabry-Perot cavity length, and refractive index of the photonic crystal dielectric. This work provides a new approach for the implementation of low threshold optical bistable devices in the visible light band, which is expected to be applied in nonlinear optical fields such as all optical switches and all optical logic devices.

Kousik Mukherjee, Paresh Chandra Jana