Polarization based control of optical hysteresis in coupled GaAs microdisks

TLDR: In this article, an all-optical method of controlling hysteretic emission of evanescently coupled GaAs microdisk pairs is presented. But the method is not suitable for large arrays.

Abstract: Optical microresonators crafted from semiconducting materials are powerful systems for both understanding and harnessing the interactions between light and matter. We report an all-optical method of controlling the hysteretic emission of evanescently coupled GaAs microdisk pairs. Under partial excitation, the coupled lasing emission demonstrates optical bistability caused by saturable absorption. We observe that the presence of hysteresis can be modulated by the polarization state of the incident excitation. This optical control is an important functionality which, if extended to a large array, could lead to the creation of optical flip-flop and gated logic devices with multinode capabilities.