Controlling the Performance of Polymer Lasers via the Cavity Coupling.

Shuai Zhang,Tianrui Zhai,Chengbin Liang,Xinping Zhang,Junhua Tong,Fengzhao Cao,Chao Chen,Yanrong Song

doi:10.3390/polym11050764

Abstract

The polarization and threshold of distributed feedback (DFB) polymer lasers were controlled by adjusting the cavity coupling. The cavity of DFB polymer lasers consisted of two gratings, which was fabricated by a two-beam multi-exposure holographic technique. The coupling strength of the cavity modes was tuned by changing the angle between the two gratings. The threshold of the polymer lasers decreased with reducing the coupling strength of the cavity modes. A minimum threshold was observed at the lowest coupling strength. Moreover, the azimuthally polarized output of the polymer lasers was modified by changing the cavity coupling. These results may provide additional perspectives to improve the performance of DFB polymer lasers.

Highlights

In the last several decades, polymer lasers have attracted much interest and distributed feedback (DFB) polymer lasers have achieved many unique developments and applications [1,2,3,4]
The performance of 2D DFB polymer lasers was controlled by changing the coupling
The performance of 2D DFB polymer lasers was controlled by changing the strength between the two substructures in the cavity

Summary

Introduction

In the last several decades, polymer lasers have attracted much interest and distributed feedback (DFB) polymer lasers have achieved many unique developments and applications [1,2,3,4]. Due to the good confinement, two-dimensional (2D) DFB polymer lasers have a lower threshold and higher photoluminescence (PL) efficiency and the output beams have different profiles than one-dimensional (1D) DFB polymer lasers [9]. Considerable research efforts have been devoted to the special emission spot of 2D DFB polymer lasers, which is axisymmetric polarization light [14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. The low threshold of the 2D DFB polymer laser is attributed to a better confinement of light than that of the 1D DFB polymer laser. The threshold behavior of 2D DFB polymer lasers can be explained quantitatively by a cavity coupling theory. The coupling strength can be tuned continuously by changing the angle between the substructures

Methods

Results

Conclusion