New Mechanism of Intrinsic Bistability of the Optical Media under Repetitive Pulse Excitation

Abstract

A new type of intrinsic bistability is proposed when usually "non-bistable" nonlinear medium shows bistability under action of a time-dependent input signal. A strict criterion for observation of such a bistability is deduced. It depends on the shape of the temporal response of the nonlinear medium under action of a separate rectangular input pulse.