Spectral singularities are ubiquitous with PT-symmetry leading to infinite transmission and reflection coefficients. Such infinities imply the divergence of the fields in the medium thereby breaking the very assumption of the linearity of the medium used to obtain such singularities. We identify saturable nonlinearity retaining contributions from all orders of the field to limit the infinite growth and regularize the spectral singularity. We present explicit numerical results to demonstrate regularization. The all order nonlinear PT-symmetric device is shown to exhibit very effective isolation or optical diode action, since transmission through such a system is nonreciprocal. In contrast, a linear system or a system with Kerr nonlinearity is known to have only reciprocal transmission. Further we demonstrate optical bistability for such a system with high contrast.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.8282

Optics (physics.optics)