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Optical bistability and hysteresis of hybrid metal-semiconductor nano-dimer

Optical response of an artificial composite nano-dimer comprising a semiconductor quantum dot and a metal nanosphere is analyzed theoretically. We show that internal degrees of freedom of the system can manifest bistability and optical hysteresis as functions of the incident field intensity. We argue that these effects can be observed for the real world systems, such as a CdSe quantum dot and an Au nanoparticle hybrids. These properties can be revealed by measuring the optical hysteresis of the Rayleigh scattering. We show also that the total dipole moment of the system can be switched abruptly between its two stable states by small changes in the excitation intensity. The latter promises various applications in the field of all-optical processing at nanoscale, the most underlying of them being the volatile optical memory.