Excitonic effects in dense media: breakdown of intrinsic optical bistability

Vladimir I. Yudson, P. Reineker

Nguyen Ba An

The present article shortly reviews some recent results in the study of excitonic nonlinearity in optically excited media using a nonboson treatment for many-exciton systems. After a brief discussion of the exciton nonbosonity the closed commutation relations are given for exciton operators which hold for any exciton density and type. The nonboson treatment is then applied to the problems of intrinsic optical bistability and nonlinear polariton yielding quite interesting and new effects, e.g. new shapes of hysteresis loops of intrinsic optical bistability or anomalies of polariton dispersion.

Eiichi Hanamura

Anatoly A. Afanas'ev, Vasiliy Ivanovich Reshetnyak, R. A. Vlasov +5 more

The intrinsic optical bistability, soliton formation, and transient phenomena such as the free polarization decay and photon echo in dense resonant media are investigated, taking into account the short-range dipole-dipole interaction of atoms.

Moira L. Steyn‐Ross, Crispin W. Gardiner

J. L. Font, Ramon A. Vilaseca, Kęstutis Staliūnas +2 more

It is well known that dense materials with local-field effects can show "intrinsic" optical bistability when they are directly irradiated by a light beam. This has been shown theoretically in a number of works and also experimentally in several cases, in gas media and also in doped solid-state materials where nonlinearities based on standard local-field effects can be reinforced with other ion interaction effects. Although from the point of view of applications nonlinearities stronger than those found so far would be desirable, the fact that no optical resonator is needed to achieve bistability makes these materials potentially interesting for applications in optical information storage and processing.