Bistability between two crosscoupled lateral modes in twin-stripe lasers

Bistable states of crosscoupled lateral modes which couple from under one stripe to under the other in a twin-stripe laser were theoretically predicted and experimentally observed. Such an asymmetric light pattern was first observed by White and Carroll in 1983 but the mechanism for generating the mode had long been unknown until Watanabe et al explained in theoretically in 1990. In addition to clarifying the mechanism, the theory predicted that a twin-stripe laser should be bistable between two crosscoupled modes whose light patterns are mirror images of each other. The bistability has been recently observed in experiments. From an application viewpoint, it is interesting that the light distribution of crosscoupled mode bistability is similar to the voltage distribution of a set-reset flipflop in electronic circuits.