Bistability by Slow Light Photonic Crystal Waveguide

We study theoretically and numerically optical bistability in photonic crystal waveguide-cavity system with cavity holding multipole mode patterns. The elimination of dominant component of the radiation in cavity can reduce dramatically the scattering of light by cavity and can be used to achieve bistability at band edge. Numerical results performed by the finite-difference time-domain method indicate that the switch power can be reduced greatly that can be regarded as the improvement of quality-factor in cavity.