Phase instabilities in absorptive optical bistability

The authors report that for absorptive optical bistability in a Fabry-Perot cavity fluctuations in the phases of the fields can generate side-mode instabilities. These phase instabilities can occur in the one-atom branch of the bistability curve. Results are based on the linearized Maxwell-Bloch equations for a Fabry-Perot cavity with non-ideal mirrors. They strongly depend on the value of the mirror transmission coefficient and the ratio of the medium damping coefficients