All Optical Bistability in a Type II Heterostructure

Luigi A. Lugiato

R. Teissier, Richard Planel, F. Mollot

We present a bistability of low temperature photoluminescence in a n-i-n type-II GaAs/AlAs quantum heterostructure.Spectral analysis and electrical measurements indicate that the two states correspond to hole accumulation in different layers.The transition occurs with the alignment of electronic Γ and Χ states due to optical pumping, and no external voltage bias is needed.

David A. B. Miller

Stanley Desmond Smith

Myunghwan Kim, Sangin Kim, Soeun Kim

We numerically demonstrate optical bistability in a nonlinear multilayer structure by utilizing the unique dispersion of hyperbolic metamaterials. The linear transmission is varied sharply with topological transition of isofrequency contour of the multilayer structure, and this non-resonant scheme enables realization of optical bistability with a short response time and a relatively low switching intensity. We have investigated exhaustively all possible topological transitions in the dispersion characteristics of the multilayer structure for optical bistability, and shown that the hyperbolic metamaterial (HMM) type transition from Type II to Type I, and the transition from Type II HMM to effective dielectric are suitable for realizing high-performances optical bistability. The proposed schemes can overcome the trade-off between a switching intensity and a response time in resonance based optical bistabilities.

Hamid Reza Hamedi, Ali Khaledi‐Nasab, Ali Raheli +2 more

We have investigated theoretically the optical bistability (OB) and optical multistability in quantum-well (QW) semiconductor heterostructures. The effect of a cw pump laser field and a control infrared pulse signal on OB is discussed. It is found that the OB threshold can be controlled by varying the strength of applied fields. It is also shown that OB can be switched to optical multistability or vice versa just using an appropriate relative phase of applied fields. This investigation may open up some new possibilities for applications in all-optical switching in quantum-well structures.