Optical bistability and pulsating behaviour in Silicon-On-Insulator ring resonator structures

We demonstrate optical bistability in a Silicon-On-Insulator two-bus ring resonator with input powers as low as 0.3mW. We evaluate the importance of the different nonlinear contributions and derive time constants for carrier and thermal relaxation effects. In some cases, we also observe pulsation due to interaction between the dominant nonlinear effects. Such a behaviour may be problematic for possible memory and switching operations. Alternatively, it could be used for (tunable) pulse generation.