Transverse effects and enhanced dispersive optical bistability in a nonlinear Fabry–Pe´rot filled with a self‐focusing medium

摘要

This paper is concerned with transverse effects arising from diffraction in a nonlinear Fabry–Pe´rot filled with a self‐focusing medium. It is shown that the resulting bistable loop is ‘‘enhanced’’ with respect to the plane‐wave one. This result contrasts with the self‐defocusing case where optical bistability disappears when decreasing the width of the input beam.