Abstract

Intrinsic refractive optical bistability has now been observed in many semiconductors with switching powers typically in the 1-100-mW range, where refractive index changes are a result of electronic or thermal excitation. Having in mind arrays of bistable elements for 2-D optical information processing, it will be necessary to reduce power levels to <100 µW to realize the parallelism that optics offers at moderate total power levels.

© 1989 Optical Society of America