ABSTRACT
Over the past few decades, optical ring resonators have attracted a considerable amount of attention as versatile elements for a wide range of applications ranging from telecommunication and sensing to basic scientific research [1,2]. The silicon-on-insulator (SOI) material system is a mature fabrication technique and provides the ability to implement microring resonators. In addition, the high confinement of light and the large third-order nonlinearity of silicon at wavelengths in the near infrared, typically around 1.4-1.6 µm, can be utilized for a number of applications by microring resonator devices [3,4]. The optical bistability observed in silicon-based microring resonators have been theoretically investigated and numerically simulated through various sophisticated techniques [5-9]. However, only recently unifying analytical theories regarding nonlinear effects of optical bistability in microring resonators in terms of a slowly varying envelope approach have been reported [10,11]. Previously, we analytically described the nonlinear response of microring resonators consisting of an add-drop filter with feedback and showed that Fano lineshapes can be adjusted by the resonator parameters [12]. In this chapter, we extend our work to examine the optical bistabililty in such microring resonators and test the analytical results with those predicted by the OptiFDTD software package.
