OPTICAL BISTABILITY IN INCIDENT-DEPENDENT 2-DIMENSIONAL NONLINEAR-OPTICAL SUPERLATTICES

It is shown that, when two coherent waves are obliquely incident to a one-dimensional nonlinear optical superlattice containing Kerr-form di electric nonlinearity, an incident-dependent two-dimensional nonlinear optical superlattice can be constructed. This structure can be bistab le. There exist two types of optical bistable mechanism, i.e., the ind ex-modulation mechanism and distributed feedback mechanism. Owing to t he index-modulation mechanism, the threshold for the bistability is lo wer than that of a more traditional one-dimensional distributed feedba ck structure.