Abstract

True steady-state bistability with fast electronic switching is at the present state-of-the-art, very difficult to obtain when using the dynamical nonlinearities of semiconductors because of the instabilities due to the opposite nonlinear thermal effects and the difficulty to achieve efficient heat-sinking. In addition, the common way to provide switching in optical bistable etalons is to superimpose a light pulse to the holding beam, but then only switch on is possible while switch off requires a temporary reduction of the holding beam power. To overcome these difficulties we propose a symmetric type of device which effectively acts as an optical analogue of the R-S flip-flop in conventional electronics. Such principle has been demonstrated with coupled lasers [1,2] for which the input of one laser quenches the output of the other one, and reciprocally.

© 1988 Optical Society of America