MIRRORLESS OPTICAL BISTABILITY IN A SPACIALLY DISTRIBUTED COLLECTION OF 2-LEVEL SYSTEMS

We use a fully quantum, many-body treatment to show mirrorless optical bistability in terms of spatial properties among interacting two-level systems. We show that coherent dipole-dipole interactions will introduce MOB when the following three conditions are fulfilled: (a) The dipole-dipole interaction is of sufficient strength so that the 'cooperative' terms can compete with the 'induced' and 'spontaneous' terms. (b) Each atom is sufficiently affected by the average behavior to pairs of different atoms is justified. (c) The cooperative contributions from the near field region and its specific symmetry are crucial for the realization of MOB. To our knowledte, the spacial dependence and relative location of the dipoles have been ignored in all previous quantum mechanical approaches to optical bistability and are discussed here by considering the explicit spacial dependence of the coherent dipole-dipole interactions.