Fluctuations in Optical Bistability: Experiment with Shot Noise

The behavior of an optical bistable system in which the fluctuations play the dominant role has been studied on the basis of a Fokker-Planck description by Schenzle and Brand. 1 However, all the analyses so far approximate the fluctuations as arising from a constant external noise source described by a δ-correlated, Gaussian random process. 2,3 In this paper intensity-dependent shot noise fluctuations of a bistable system are experimentally studied for the first time, using a hybrid bistable optical device, and analyzed by a simple “ladder" model that fits the data well.