Hybrid nanoplasmonic systems can provide a promising platform of potential nonlinear applications due to the enhancement of optical fields near their surfaces in addition to the control of strong light-matter interactions they can afford. We theoretically investigated the optical multistability of a probe field that circulated along a unidirectional ring cavity containing a metal nanoparticle-graphene nanodisk-quantum dot hybrid system; the quantum dot was modeled as a three-level atomic system of Lambda configuration interacting with probe and control fields in the optical region of the electromagnetic spectrum. We show that the threshold and degree of multistability can be controlled by the geometry of the setup, the size of metal nanoparticles, the carrier mobility in the graphene nanodisk and the detunings of probe and control fields. We found that under electromagnetically-induced transparency conditions the system exhibits enhanced optical multistability with an ultralow threshold in the case of two-photon resonance with high carrier mobility in the graphene nanodisk. Moreover, we calculated the limits of the controllable parameters within which the switching between optical multistability and bistability can occur. We show that our proposed hybrid plasmonic system can be useful for efficient all-optical switches and logic-gate elements for quantum computing and quantum information processing.
Keywords: giant self-Kerr nonlinearity; metal nanopaticle–graphene nanodisk–quantum dot hybrid system; optical multistability threshold; unidirectional ring cavity.