Organic lasers use an
organic (carbon based) material as the gain medium. The first organic laser was the liquid
dye laser
A dye laser is a laser that uses an organic dye as the lasing medium, usually as a liquid solution. Compared to gases and most solid state lasing media, a dye can usually be used for a much wider range of wavelengths, often spanning 50 to 100 na ...
. These lasers use
laser dye
Laser dyes are dyes used as laser medium in a dye laser. Laser dyes include the coumarins and the rhodamines. Coumarin dyes emit in the green region of the spectrum, whereas rhodamine dyes are used for emission in the yellow-red. The color emi ...
solutions as their gain media.
Organic lasers are inherently tunable and when configured as optimized
multiple-prism grating laser oscillators Multiple-prism grating laser oscillators,F. J. Duarte, Narrow-linewidth pulsed dye laser oscillators, in ''Dye Laser Principles'' (Academic, New York, 1990) Chapter 4. or MPG laser oscillators, use multiple-prism beam expansion to illuminate a diff ...
can yield efficient single-transverse mode, and single-longitudinal-mode, emission with
laser linewidths as narrow as 350 MHz (approximately 0.0004 nm at a wavelength of 590 nm), in the high-power pulsed regime.
Solid-state dye lasers
Solid-state dye lasers Solid-state dye lasers (SSDL) were introduced in 1967 by Soffer and McFarland. In these solid-state lasers, the gain medium is a laser dye-doped organic matrix such as poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), rather than a liquid solution of the dye. An ...
are organic
tunable laser
A tunable laser is a laser whose wavelength of operation can be altered in a controlled manner. While all laser gain media allow small shifts in output wavelength, only a few types of lasers allow continuous tuning over a significant wavelength ran ...
s that use a variety of organic gain media, such as laser dye-doped
polymers
A polymer (; Greek '' poly-'', "many" + ''-mer'', "part")
is a substance or material consisting of very large molecules called macromolecules, composed of many repeating subunits. Due to their broad spectrum of properties, both synthetic an ...
(DDP), laser dye-doped
ormosil Ormosil is a shorthand phrase for ''organically modified silica'' or ''organically modified silicate''. In general, ormosils are produced by adding silane to silica-derived gel during the sol-gel process. They are engineered materials that show gr ...
(DDO), and laser dye-doped polymer-nanoparticle (DDPN) matrices.
DDO and DDPN gain media are subsets of a larger class of organic-inorganic hybrid materials used as laser matrices.
Organic semiconductor laser
Other types of solid-state organic lasers include the organic semiconductor lasers that use
conjugated polymers
In theoretical chemistry, a conjugated system is a system of connected p-orbitals with delocalized electrons in a molecule, which in general lowers the overall energy of the molecule and increases stability. It is conventionally represented ...
as gain media. These semiconductor materials can also be configured as "neat films."
Coherent emission, characterized via high-visibility double-slit interferograms (''V'' ~ 0.9) and near diffraction-limited beam divergence, has been reported from electrically-pumped coumarin dye-doped tandem
OLED
An organic light-emitting diode (OLED or organic LED), also known as organic electroluminescent (organic EL) diode, is a light-emitting diode (LED) in which the emissive electroluminescent layer is a film of organic compound that emits light i ...
devices.
Distributed feedback laser
Organic lasers are also available in
distributed feedback configurations and distributed feedback waveguides.
See also
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Nanoparticle
A nanoparticle or ultrafine particle is usually defined as a particle of matter that is between 1 and 100 nanometres (nm) in diameter. The term is sometimes used for larger particles, up to 500 nm, or fibers and tubes that are less than 1 ...
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Organic photonics
Organic photonics includes the generation, emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, and detection/sensing of light, using organic optical materials.
Fields within organic photonics include the liquid org ...
*
Organic semiconductors
Organic semiconductors are solids whose building blocks are pi-bonded molecules or polymers made up by carbon and hydrogen atoms and – at times – heteroatoms such as nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen. They exist in the form of molecular crystals or ...
*
Solid-state dye lasers Solid-state dye lasers (SSDL) were introduced in 1967 by Soffer and McFarland. In these solid-state lasers, the gain medium is a laser dye-doped organic matrix such as poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), rather than a liquid solution of the dye. An ...
References
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Laser types
Organic electronics