Abstract

Optical bistability has raised a sustained interest in the past ten years due to potential applications to all-optical signal processing, followed by experimental demonstrations in III-V semiconductor microresonators However it is commonly admitted that transverse mechanisms such as diffraction and carrier diffusion can seriously limit the applications developed in the frame of a plane wave (PW) analysis in increasing the energy consumption or introducing crosstalk mechanisms In particular, several authors have predicted the existence of switching waves arising from the spatial coexistence of two different PW solutions^[1], connected by an inhomogeneous intensity profile

© 2000 IEEE