Addressing optical pixel bits in a slab of dense optical material via intrinsic optical bistability

It is well known that dense materials with local-field effects can show "intrinsic" optical bistability when they are directly irradiated by a light beam. This has been shown theoretically in a number of works and also experimentally in several cases, in gas media and also in doped solid-state materials where nonlinearities based on standard local-field effects can be reinforced with other ion interaction effects. Although from the point of view of applications nonlinearities stronger than those found so far would be desirable, the fact that no optical resonator is needed to achieve bistability makes these materials potentially interesting for applications in optical information storage and processing.