This book contains all the papers presented at the NATO workshop on "Optical Switching in Low Dimensional Systems" held in Marbella, Spain from October 6th to 8th, 1988. Optical switching is a basic function for optical data processing, which is of technological interest because of its potential parallelism and its potential speed. Semiconductors which exhibit resonance enhanced optical nonlinearities in the frequency range close to the band edge are the most intensively studied materials for optical bistability and fast gate operation. Modern crystal growth techniques, particularly molecular...