Quantum features of optical excitation of a passive cavity

Dmitry V. Skryabin, A. M. Radin

Bastian Hacker, Severin Daiss, Stephan Welte +3 more

Robert G. Harrison, W. J. Firth, Chassib A. Emshary +1 more

Dispersive optical hysteresis in an all optical passive unidirectional ring cavity containing a molecular gas has been observed. Ammonia is used as the nonlinear medium off resonantly excited on the aR(1,1) transition using temporally smooth 100-ns pulses from a transversely, excited, atmospheric pressure CO2 laser. Results are in excellent agreement with the theory of Ikeda recently generalized by the authors to describe period doubling in this system.

C. A. Schrama, Dirk Bouwmeester, Gerard Nienhuis +1 more

Luigi A. Lugiato, Franco Prati, Massimo Brambilla

In Chapter 9 we discussed the case of a nonlinear cavity containing an active medium. In this framework, the outstanding phenomenon which arises is laser emission, and we calculated the stationary solutions for the ring laser. In this chapter, instead, we turn our attention to the passive nonlinear cavity and in this framework the outstanding phenomenon is optical bistability , i.e. the existence of two distinct stable stationary states that coexist for the same fixed values of the parameters in play. This phenomenon can arise also in the case of an active system contained in a cavity, as we have already noted in Section 9.1 and as we will discuss further in connection with the laser with injected signal, but it became popular from the studies of nonlinear passive optical cavities in the 1970s and 1980s. In contrast to the laser case, in the passive configuration we use an input coherent field, which is injected into the cavity. We discussed this case in Chapter 8 and derived a general equation for the transmission of the cavity (Eq. (8.23)), which we used for an empty cavity and for a linear cavity in Sections 8.4 and 8.5, respectively. In this chapter we will discuss the full nonlinear configuration. It is customary to identify two extreme cases of optical bistability called absorptive optical bistability and dispersive or refractive optical bistability . In both cases an essential ingredient to obtain the bistable behavior is the feedback action exerted by the mirrors of the cavity. In the purely absorptive configuration, in which there is exact resonance among the frequencies of the input field, of the atoms and of the cavity, the other essential ingredient is the saturable nonlinearity of the absorption. In the dispersive case, instead, the main feature is the nonlinearity of the refractive index. These two cases will be illustrated in Sections 11.1 and 11.2, respectively, both “exactly” and in the low-transmission limit.

А.В. Андреев, Oleg Tikhomirov, Mikhail V. Fedotov