Thermally induced optical multistability with a beam splitter in the degenerate two-beam interferometer configuration

Thermo-optical Bistability in Two-beam Interferometers with in-phase Outputs

“…As discussed in §2 .1, with suitable beam splitters, it is possible to achieve so high an interference contrast upon the film inner light that bd : 1 . We have also shown in [12] and [17] that a similar situation can be obtained in lossy cavities where the absorption is fully localized in the input mirror coating, i .e. where the recombination of multiple waves takes place .…”

“…The interference output powers, P1 =S1PE and P2 =S2 PE , are given within the plane-wave approximation by where R, R' and T denote the air/film and substrate/film reflectivities and transmission of the dividing film, respectively, and S R , 8 Figure 1 (d) depicts the so-called degenerate two-beam interferometer configuration, in which one of the input waves that is incident on the beam splitter is derived from one of its own outputs, and then the internal light beam also participates in the feedback mechanism. This cavity system has been theoretically and experimentally analysed elsewhere [12,17] and is only introduced here for the purposes of comparison .…”

“…Nevertheless, it has been pointed out recently [17] that cavities with absorption losses localized in the input reflective coating may exhibit mutually independent contrast and finesse, i .e . high-contrast but low-finesse cavities exist that behave similarly to two-beam interferometers, and multi-stable responses have been demonstrated on the basis of either the thermal expansion of glass [12,19] or the thermo-optical effect in various liquids [17] within cavities of this kind .…”

“…As a matter of fact, thermal optical bistability has been achieved with light of submilliwatt power [17,18], while all-optical devices based on nonlinearities of electronic origin require ten times more power, even in the best case [3] . Thermally-induced optical bistability has been obtained in systems based on various semiconductors (AsGa [6], Si [7], CdHgTe [8], ZnSe and ZnS [9], GaAs/A1GaAs MQW (multiple quantum well) [10], GeSe2 [13], CdS [14], InSb [15]), optical glasses [5,11,12] and different liquids (ethylene glycol [16,17], water [18], CS2, CC1 4 , quinoline [17] and liquid crystals [18]) .…”

“…Nevertheless, optical bistability has also been obtained on the basis of light-induced linear effects, such as the radiation pressure on a suspended cavity reflector [4] or the thermal effects resulting from light absorption [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] . In particular, let us emphasize thermal optical bistability, since the present work deals with it .…”