Intermodal Bistability and Bimodality in Coupled-Cavity Semiconductor Lasers

Abstract

Coupled-cavity semiconductor lasers are known to exhibit bistability under certain circumstances. There are two distinctly different manifestations of bistability; in the first, the laser is capable of exciting the same longitudinal mode at different power and carrier densities (intramodal bistability); in the second, the laser switches between two different longitudinal modes (intermodal bistability). The latter case is the subject of this paper.