Critical phenomena and phase transitions in optical bistability

Critical phenomena in optical bistability (OB) are studied in detail. The theoretical analyses, mainly based on the steady-state solution of the ``thermodynamics'' Fokker-Planck equation [Fa Ou and Zixiong Qin, Opt. Commun. 65, 455 (1988)] for absorptive OB, show that the critical phenomena in OB also can be brought into the framework of Landau's theory for the second-order phase transition, and the critical exponents obey the scaling laws.