During the past few decades we have witnessed at least two major innovations in science which have had substantial impact on technology as well as science itself, pervasive enough to modify many facets of our daily lives. We refer, of course, to the tran sistor and the laser. It is striking that now with the advent of optical bistability we may have opened the door to another such field, which combines these two aspects (transistor and laser) and has the possibility for important device applications as well as providing a unique window into the as yet not thoroughly explored frontiers of nonequilibrium statistical physics. This has prompted us to organize an international conference on the subject of optical bistability to provide an adequate means for assessing the current state of the art of this important field and to stimulate further significant developments by means of in tense technical exchange and interaction among the leading scien tists in this subject area.

This volume is a collection of experimental and theoretical papers presented at the international "Topical Meeting on Optical Bistability," held at the University of Rochester, June 15-17, 1983, sponsored jointly by the Air Force Office of Scientific Re search; the Army Research Office; and the Optical Society of America. The Conference, which had 150 attendees, overlapped (on June 15) with the Fifth Rochester Conference on Coherence and Quantum Optics with two joint sessions. Some of the topics cover ed in this volume are also treated io the Proceedings of that Conference. Since the last international conference on Optical Bistability, held in Asheville, North Carolina, June 3-5, 1980, there have been new and important fundamental advances in the field. This is borne out in papers in this volume dealing with optical chaos and period doubling bifurcations leading to chaos as well as the report of results of an experiment using a very simple system exhibiting ab sorptive optical bistability in a ring cavity using optically pump ed sodium atoms, which was successfully analyzed quantitatively by a simple theory. Other advances discussed here include the ob servation of optical bistability due to the effect of radiation pressure on one mirror of a fabry-Perot cavity. and the prediction of mirrorless intrinsic opittal bistability due to the local field correction incorporated into the Maxwell-Bloch formulation. Advances in optical bistability in semiconductors relate closer to actual device applications."