The Impact of polarization on the performance of all-optical flip-flops

This thesis experimentally characterizes the polarization dependence of an all-optical flip-flop (AOFF) based on a resonant-type semiconductor optical amplifier. Previous demonstrations of such an optical-memory device have exhibited poor on-off contrasts of around 3 dB (2:1). Our work maps out the dependence of the bistable hysteresis on the injected polarization state for the first time and clearly shows how to optimize the on-off contrast to achieve 8 dB. Beyond this optimization technique, it also demonstrate a novel technique to achieve and on-off contrast exceeding 30 dB (1000:1)