Quantum Popov robust stability analysis of an optical cavity containing a saturated Kerr medium

Abstract: This paper applies results on the robust stability of nonlinear quantum systems to a system consisting an optical cavity containing a saturated Kerr medium. The system is characterized by a Hamiltonian operator which contains a non-quadratic term involving a quartic function of the annihilation and creation operators. A saturated version of the Kerr nonlinearity leads to a sector bounded nonlinearity which enables a quantum small gain theorem to be applied to this system in order to analyze its stability. Also, a non-quadratic version of a quantum Popov stability criterion is presented and applied to analyze the stability of this system.