Organic lasers use an

organic Organic may refer to: * Organic, of or relating to an organism, a living entity * Organic, of or relating to an anatomical organ Chemistry * Organic matter, matter that has come from a once-living organism, is capable of decay or is the product ...

(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 ...

. 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 can yield efficient single-transverse mode, and single-longitudinal-mode, emission with

laser linewidth Laser linewidth is the spectral linewidth of a laser beam. Two of the most distinctive characteristics of laser emission are spatial coherence and spectral coherence. While spatial coherence is related to the beam divergence of the laser, spe ...

s 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 e ...

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 a ...

(DDP), laser dye-doped ormosil (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.

References

{{reflist Laser types Organic electronics

Solid-state dye lasers

Organic semiconductor laser

Distributed feedback laser

See also

References