Resonatorless Optical Bistability

Intrinsic (mirrorless) optical bistability (MOB) has been predicted independently by a number of authors1. Recent experiments have demonstrated at least one major aspect of this phenomenon, i.e., MOB due to increasing absorption2. Other categories of MOB which have been predicted from theoretical models are caused by: interatomic correlation in a many-body quantum model, the anharmonic contribution in a classical Duffing oscillator, the local field correction in the macroscopic Maxwell-Bloch formulation, and coherent dipole-dipole interaction in a microscopic semiclassical model of a finite number of damped, two-level atoms driven by an external field3. All of these models share a single common characteristic which causes MOB in some region of the parameter space of each model. The characteristic is simply: an interaction-dependent nonlinearity which causes a renormalization of the resonance frequency. In each case, the sign and magnitude of the incident field detuning from the unrenormalized resonance is a crucial parameter.