Abstract

It is well known that the excitation of ZnSe and CdS with the blue and green lines, respectively, of an argon laser causes all-optical bistability (all-OB) in the features of the excitation, i.e., in the transmittance (all-OBT) and in the reflectance (all-OBR). By means of coincident measurements of all-OBRs and all-OBTs of thin (≤10-μm) ZnSe and CdS films, we observed the a priori highly unexpected feature that even if an all-OBT is observed, no all-OBR takes place, as shown in Fig. 1. The observed phenomenon can be explained by the peculiar dependence of the reflectance on temperature, which differs considerably—in contrast to dependence of the transmittance on temperature—from the theoretically expected shape, and by considering the bistability in luminescence (all-OBL), which was discovered recently.¹² Particularly, the results can be interpreted by the expression

© 1995 Optical Society of America