Abstract

In a recent paper (1) we formulated a running wave, singlemode model for purely dispersive optical bistability, which incorporates amplitude and frequency fluctuations in the incident field, cavity length fluctuations, thermal noise in the radiation field and in the material. In the bad-cavity case of miniaturized bistable devices which utilize semiconductor dispersive media, our model reduces to a single stochastic differential equation for the material variable, which contains several terms of additive and multiplicative noise. In the white-noise case, it is equivalent to a Fokker-Planck equation in one variable, whereas in the case of colored noise it is equivalent to a multidimensional Fokker-Planck equation. On the basis of this model, we examined both problem of practical (P) and of fundamental (F) interest.

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