Abstract
The production of efficient, tunable, and switchable circularly polarized laser emission would have far reaching implications in optical communications or biophotonics. In this work, it is demonstrated the direct generation of circularly polarized (CP) laser emission in achiral and isotropic dye laser systems without the use of extracavity polarizing elements, and without resorting to chiral dyes, chiral liquid crystal matrices, or interferometric methods. The origin of this ellipticity arises from the dynamic birefringence induced by the strong and polarized laser pumping and the subsequent orientation anisotropy of the excited molecular dipoles. A complete polarimetric characterization of the polarization state of conventional dye laser oscillators as a function of different experimental parameters is performed and it is shown that the generated light always possesses a certain level of circularity that changes in a distinctive way with pump energy and polarization. These results demonstrate that it is possible to generate and modulate CP laser light from efficient and photostable conventional laser dyes.
Highlights
Chirality, the asymmetry property by which an object or structure and its mirror image are not superimposable, plays an important role in material science[1,2]
To develop circularly polarized (CP) laser technologies to its full potential, we designed a new strategy to laser-induced chirogenesis in achiral isotropic media with the aim to simultaneously overcome the limitations imposed by the synthesis of bespoke chiral dyes, and the complexity associated to engineered CP laser in achiral gain media by the spatial modulation of the index-grating induced by interfering two polarized pump beams
We report an unprecedented strategy to generate and modulate efficient and photostable CP laser emission from achiral laser dyes commercially available dissolved in achiral isotropic solvents and transversely pumped in a plane-parallel
Summary
The asymmetry property by which an object or structure and its mirror image are not superimposable, plays an important role in material science[1,2]. To develop CP laser technologies to its full potential, we designed a new strategy to laser-induced chirogenesis in achiral isotropic media with the aim to simultaneously overcome the limitations imposed by the synthesis of bespoke chiral dyes, and the complexity associated to engineered CP laser in achiral gain media by the spatial modulation of the index-grating induced by interfering two polarized pump beams. Our present results demonstrate that the unique properties of laser radiation are sufficient to manipulate the physical behaviour in materials as to transform achiral organic dyes into an enantiopure-like system without altering its chemical identity In this way, our strategy is a powerful approach to open new avenues for developing cost-effective and easy processable chiro-photonic elements and media
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