The effect of initial phase factor on the properties of an electro-optical bistable system

The hybrid bistable system with a delay in the feedback loop, which was originally proposed and studied by Ikeda[1], has been widely investigated[2,3,4] as this system plays many common instability behaviours of nonlinear dynamical systems. There is an initial phase factor in the equation describing the system dynamics as there are for most other bistable systems, which is equivalent to the bias in the device. We report the important role played by this phase factor in the bistability and instability behaviours, especially when the input intensity of the system is modulated harmonically.