OPTICAL BISTABILITY IN A NONLINEAR DIRECTIONAL COUPLER

In the nonlinear directional coupler, the optical held and the nonlinear material usually interact in a spatially and temporally local fashion and the device exhibits a nonlinear transmission characteristics, but it is not bistable. In this paper, it is shown theoretically that optical bistability in the input optical power is possible for the nonlinear directional coupler if the local phase change of the optical mode propagating through the coupler is influenced by the excitation over the whole coupler. This condition can be satisfied in a coupler based on biased-pin-diodes comprising coupled asymmetric quantum wells in the i-region, Calculations show that in this configuration, the nonlinear directional coupler can exhibit sharp switching characteristics, low switching optical powers, optical bistability or bifurcation.