Optical Bistability in Incident-Dependent Two-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 dielectric nonlinearity, an incident-dependent two-dimensional nonlinear optical superlattice can be constructed. This structure can be bistable. There exist two types of optical bistable mechanism, i. e., the index-modulation mechanism and distributed feedback mechanism. Owing to the index-modulation mechanism, the threshold for the bistability is lower than that of a more traditional one-dimensional distributed feedback structure.