Abstract

Under certain conditions, for example diffusive nonlinearities, bistability can occur under appropriate angular detuning conditions when a grating or prism is used to couple an externally incident field into a thin film waveguide.^1-5 In this paper we demonstrate experimentally that the bistable response of an in-coupled guided wave can be enhanced by a second counter-propagating guided wave which utilizes the same grating as an output coupler. This is verified for both an externally controlled second beam, as well as for an integrated device in which a nonlinear distributed feedback grating provides a power-dependent reflection coefficient.

© 1990 Optical Society of America