Lasing action from dye doped polymeric nanofibers: A comparison study of well aligned with randomly oriented nanofibers

Abstract

Abstract Ordering properties of a scattering media plays important role in a lasing emission system. In this work, we report a comparison study of optical amplification and lasing action from well aligned and randomly oriented dye doped polymeric nanofibers. Parallel aligned and randomly oriented dye doped polymeric nanofibers were prepared by electrospinning. Different optical phenomenon has been obtained from such two type fiber systems: amplified spontaneous emission from the well aligned nanofibers, and multimode random lasing emission with many sharp peaks from the randomly oriented nanofibers. To evaluate the effect of the microcavity effect, we carry out a comparative study of the optical pumped emission, threshold, and polarization properties of the two systems. Based on the comparison results, we try to discuss the mechanism for the optical cavity formation, where packing arrangement of the fibers plays a key role in the luminescence mechanism. Our comparative study of emission properties from well aligned and randomly oriented fibers manifest that the essence of random lasing is a highly disordered gain medium.