Solid State Dye Doped Lasing Medium Applied To Widely Tunable,Integratable Micro-Cavity Lasers With Low Thresholds

With a compact structure, solid state micro-cavity dye laser has advantages including low threshold, wide tunability and integratablity, thus becoming a promising part to be integrated in photonic integrated circuit (PIC). However, applying solid state micro-cavity dye lasers to real PICs is still being hindered in several aspects. For one thing, it is difficult to tune the output lasers due to the complexities of fabricating these devices as well as to change the lengths and refractive indices of the lasing medium. Secondly, when pumping with near-infrared wavelength for which laser sources are inexpensive and more powerful than lasers needed for single-photon pumping, it is less likely to achieve a low threshold of solid state micro-cavity dye laser because of the poor solubility of two-photon dyes. Thirdly, it lacks a reliable and inexpensive way to integrate micro-cavity lasers on PICs.Accordingly, in the first part of this work we put forward a solution to resolve the difficulty of tuning the output laser spectrum of vertical-cavity surface-emitting lase (VCSEL) by adopting polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which can be deformed by mechanical stress, as the host matrices. The photostability and capacity of self-curing of dye doped VCSEL were also analyzed. Secondly, ionogel was used as the host matrices for two-photon absorption dye, and this work achieved the result of a higher solubility of two-photon absorption dyes and a low threshold of two-photon pumped micro-cavity laser when compared with related works. Finally, ink-jet printing was employed to integrate micro-cavity lasers on substrates.By doping different dyes into PDMS films, changing DBRs with various stop bands and applying mechanical stresses, widely tunable lasers had been realized based on dye-doped VCSEL. Additionally, Pyrrole methylene 597-8C9 (PM597-8C9) doped VCSEL were proved to have a remarkable runability with the output laser spectrum ranging from 592.2 nm to 690.2nm. Furthermore, when pumped with the energy of ten times the threshold, it turned out that the output energy didn’t attenuate after 1.2×105 pulses.Ionogel was adopted as host matrices to increase the solubility of two-photon dyes in this work. As a result, we fabricated two-photon pumped micro-cavity laser with a threshold of-63mJ/cm2, which is one of the lowest thresholds ever reported.Dye doped hyper-branched polymer (HBP) was used as host matrices and ink-jet printed on substrates. Based on VCSEL and DFB structure, micro-cavity laser was obtained. The lowest threshold in this work is～77.5nJ, with the corresponding slope efficiency as 40.2%.