Optical bistability of nonlinear waves in multilayer nonlinear waveguides

Summary form only given. Nonlinear guided waves have received much attention due to its potential application to all optical signal processing. In this paper we analyze the optical bistability of the nonlinear waves and obtain the critical power with varying the thickness of the nonlinear layers in a multilayer nonlinear waveguide system which is composed of five layers including two nonlinear layers covered by semi-infinite cladding and substrate. The nonlinear dispersion relations are formulated for self-focusing and self-defocusing nonlinear structures using the nonlinear transfer matrix