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Annual Meeting Optical Society of America

Theory and optimization of optical bistability in multilayer interference filters

David C. Hutchings, Brian S. Wherrett

Published Jan 1, 1989• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Intrinsic refractive optical bistability has now been observed in many semiconductors with switching powers typically in the 1-100-mW range, where refractive index changes are a result of electronic or thermal excitation. Having in mind arrays of bistable elements for 2-D optical information processing, it will be necessary to reduce power levels to <100 µW to realize the parallelism that optics offers at moderate total power levels.

DOI
10.1364/oam.1989.thcc2

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Intrinsic refractive optical bistability has now been observed in many semiconductors with switching powers typically in the 1-100-mW range, where refractive index changes are a result of electronic or thermal excitation. Having in mind arrays of bistable elements for 2-D optical information processing, it will be necessary to reduce power levels to <100 µW to realize the parallelism that optics offers at moderate total power levels.
Refractive changes in semiconductors used in optical bistability are induced as a result of excitations generated by intense light levels. To date such excitations have been either electronic (carriers excited to higher energy states) as in InSb or thermal as in ZnSe. Usually such refractive index changes are small and it is necessary to introduce some form of optical feedback in order to obtain a useful change in the output signal. Various configurations which provide optical feedback are examined and the optimisation for low switching power levels is addressed.
Abstract The design of optically bistable cavities for low-power switching requires an understanding of the variation of nonlinearities in refractive index with material, temperature, wavelength and cavity parameters. Analytic expressions, suitable for scaling, are discussed. The connections between the giant nonlinearities under current investigation and the nonlinear optical mixing processes studied since the 1960s are reviewed and the self-consistent semiconductor optical bistability problem is summarized.
Dispersive bistability arising from the carrier-dependence of the refractive index has been observed in semiconductor lasers operated just below threshold with a small injected optical signal. The minimum optical input required for switch-up is as low as 1 μW for InGaAsP amplifiers at 1.55 μm(1) and 1.3 μm(2) (cf 30 μW for GaAs devices(3)). As yet, reliable measurements of the dynamic response are not (4) available, although we predict recovery times to be on the order of carrier lifetimes, ie a few nanoseconds at room temperature. This contribution will review our experimental and theoretical work on 1.55 μm amplifier bistability and set it in the context of other semiconductor bistable optical devices.