Recent advances in solid-state organic lasers

TL;DR

This review summarizes recent progress in solid-state organic lasers, highlighting advances in materials, architectures, performance, and emerging technologies like polariton and surface plasmon-based lasers, while discussing remaining challenges such as electrical pumping.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the latest developments in organic solid-state laser technology, emphasizing new materials, device architectures, and nanophotonics applications.

Findings

Organic lasers are broadly tunable and potentially low-cost coherent sources.

Recent developments include improved wavelength coverage, efficiency, and device compactness.

Emerging laser types based on polaritons and surface plasmons open new research avenues.

Abstract

Organic solid-state lasers are reviewed, with a special emphasis on works published during the last decade. Referring originally to dyes in solid-state polymeric matrices, organic lasers also include the rich family of organic semiconductors, paced by the rapid development of organic light emitting diodes. Organic lasers are broadly tunable coherent sources are potentially compact, convenient and manufactured at low-costs. In this review, we describe the basic photophysics of the materials used as gain media in organic lasers with a specific look at the distinctive feature of dyes and semiconductors. We also outline the laser architectures used in state-of-the-art organic lasers and the performances of these devices with regard to output power, lifetime, and beam quality. A survey of the recent trends in the field is given, highlighting the latest developments in terms of wavelength coverage, wavelength agility, efficiency and compactness, or towards integrated low-cost sources, with a special focus on the great challenges remaining for achieving direct electrical pumping. Finally, we discuss the very recent demonstration of new kinds of organic lasers based on polaritons or surface plasmons, which open new and very promising routes in the field of organic nanophotonics.