Spontaneous oscillations, transverse diffusion instability and spatial dissipaive structures in optical bistability and multistability

It is predicted that new transverse effects may appear in bistable and multistable optical systems with two competing nonlinearity mechanisms. It is shown that transverse diffusion of variables in such systems may give rise to traveling or static spatially inhomogeneous dissipative structures in the form of traveling pulses or static layers. A theoretical analysis is made in the specific case of a semiconductor Fabry–Perot interferometer with carrier-density and thermal dispersion nonlinearities. It is also shown that this interferometer may exhibit spatially homogeneous spontaneous oscillations of the transmission near various equilibrium positions, generation of single pulses in response to an external perturbation, and complex transient processes in the course of switching.