Optical bistability in photonic crystal microrings with nonlinear dielectric materials.

We study the linear resonance properties of several types of microrings in a two-dimensional photonic crystal (PC) consisting of a square lattice with air holes in dielectric using the plane-wave expansion method and the FDTD method. Moreover we investigate the nonlinear responses, especially optical bistability when an intense optical pulse is incident into the microrings. In this paper, Ag-As-Se chalcogenide glass is assumed as nonlinear dielectric, which has a high third-order nonlinearity. Although line-defect waveguides in an air-hole-type PC are usually multimoded, we can obtain interesting unique properties such as counter rotation of intracavity fields, transmission to all output ports, and unstable nonlinear oscillations in the multimoded PC microring. We can improve the resonance characteristics by partly introducing single-mode waveguides into microrings and can obtain stable optical bistability.