  Optical bistability of exciton polaritons in semiconductor microcavities is a
promising platform for digital optical devices. Steady states of coherently
driven polaritons can be toggled in tens of picoseconds by a short external
pulse of appropriate amplitude and phase. We have analyzed the switching
behavior of polaritons depending on the pulse amplitude, phase, and duration.
The switches are found to change dramatically when the inverse pulse duration
becomes comparable to the frequency detuning between the driving field and
polariton resonance. If the detuning is large compared to the polariton
linewidth, the system becomes extremely sensitive to initial conditions and
thus can serve as a fast random-number generator.
