Compact solid-state organic laser with fine and broadband wavelength tunability.

An organic dye-doped polymer laser with a novel wavelength-tuning mechanism is proposed. This device is a vertical cavity surface-emitting laser realized by using a couple of distributed Bragg reflectors (DBRs), on which a dye-doped polymer thin film and a polydimethylsiloxane film are deposited individually. One of the DBRs is electrically driven to vary the effective cavity length. Under the optical excitation, tunable lasing operation with high stability can be achieved when immersion oil is used for the refractive index matching in the cavity. Since the device operation mechanism proposed here is quite simple, it is promising for designing a compact laser device with wide, precise, and electrically driven wavelength tunability.

High-gain and wide-band optical amplifications induced by a coupled excited state of organic dye molecules co-doped in polymer waveguide.

We investigated optical gain and lasing characteristics of a polymer thin film co-doped with Rhodamine 6G and 4-(Dicyanomethylene)-2-methyl-6-(4-dimethylaminostyryl)-4H-pyran dye molecules. By the co-doping of these dyes, the optical gain coefficient and its spectral range were enhanced and widened, respectively. These results cannot be accounted for by the linear combination of the optical gain properties of single-doped films. Owing to this high-gain and wide-band optical amplification property, a distributed feedback lasing with a low threshold of 70 µJ/cm2 as well as a widely tunable wavelength range of 587-613 nm was achieved. We attribute this amplification property of the co-doped film, which cannot be achieved with the single-doped films, to the appearance of a coupled excited state between the two molecules.