Multistability in a Chiral Semiconductor Microcavity

Abstract

The features of the bi- and multistability effects in the semiconductor Bragg microcavity with a chiral photonic crystal slab on the upper mirror are investigated theoretically. It is shown that the response of such a chiral structure under a linearly polarized coherent resonant pump demonstrates sharp multistable transitions with abrupt jumps of the exciton intensity and degree of circular polarization. It is shown that the thresholds of bistable transitions in the system with a different sense of circular polarization differ slightly; i.e., in the case of a nonoptimized structure, we can expect to obtain even a larger amplitude of jumps of the degree of circular polarization of the excitonic response due to the multistability than in a specially optimized chiral structure with a high degree of circular polarization at a low pump intensity.