Abstract

Intrinsic optical bistable devices have the potential for very fast all-optical logic.¹ Achievement of high speeds necessitates short devices. Semiconductors are attractive materials for providing the essential optical nonlinearity because they can have absorption coefficients of order (μm)^-1, ensuring strong interactions in short lengths. Furthermore, they have relatively sharp absorption features, e.g., an exciton, biexciton, or band-edge resonance, which permits very large nonlinear phase shifts via near-resonance enhancement but with low absorption by off-resonance operation.

© 1983 Optical Society of America