Abstract
The chemical synthesis of nanographene molecules constitutes the bottom-up approach toward graphene, simultaneously providing rational chemical design, structure-property control and exploitation of their semiconducting and luminescence properties. Here, we report nanographene-based lasers from three zigzag-edged polycyclic aromatics. The devices consist of a passive polymer film hosting the nanographenes and a top-layer polymeric distributed feedback resonator. Both the active material and the laser resonator are processed from solution, key for the purpose of obtaining low-cost devices with mechanical flexibility. The prepared lasers show narrow linewidth ( < 0.13 nm) emission at different spectral regions covering a large segment of the visible spectrum, and up to the vicinity of the near-infrared. They show outstandingly long operational lifetimes (above 105 pump pulses) and very low thresholds. These results represent a significant step forward in the field of graphene and broaden its versatility in low-cost devices implying light emission, such as lasers.
Highlights
The chemical synthesis of nanographene molecules constitutes the bottom-up approach toward graphene, simultaneously providing rational chemical design, structure-property control and exploitation of their semiconducting and luminescence properties
The possibility of having lasing action covering the whole or a large portion of the visible spectrum for versatile applications, is even more challenging and tough to obtain[14,15]. This is exemplified by the case of obtaining organic materials displaying amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) and lasing in the near-infrared (NIR) border of the visible region[16]
In the field of organic thin-film lasers[9,18,19], those based on active waveguide films and distributed feedback (DFB) resonators, both made of solution-processed organic materials, are receiving major attention for their prospect as inexpensive, mechanically flexible, wavelength tunable, compact lasers with easy integration to other devices[20,21,22,23,24,25,26]
Summary
The chemical synthesis of nanographene molecules constitutes the bottom-up approach toward graphene, simultaneously providing rational chemical design, structure-property control and exploitation of their semiconducting and luminescence properties. In the field of organic thin-film lasers[9,18,19], those based on active waveguide films and distributed feedback (DFB) resonators, both made of solution-processed organic materials, are receiving major attention for their prospect as inexpensive, mechanically flexible, wavelength tunable, compact lasers with easy integration to other devices[20,21,22,23,24,25,26] Within this context, a recent landmark was the demonstration of lasers based on a toplayer resonator (a resist layer with an engraved one-dimensional relief grating) fabricated by holographic lithography (HL), which in combination with highly efficient and photostable dyes, showed multi-color emission in a centimeter-size single device with excellent performance[25]
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