Biomineral Amorphous Lasers through Light‐Scattering Surfaces Assembled by Electrospun Fiber Templates

Abstract

New materials aim at exploiting the great control of living organisms over molecular architectures and minerals. Optical biomimetics has been widely developed by microengineering, leading to photonic components with order resembling those found in plants and animals. These systems, however, are realized by complicated and adverse processes. Here we show how biomineralization might enable the one-step generation of components for amorphous photonics, in which light is made to travel through disordered scattering systems, and particularly of active devices such as random lasers, by using electrospun fiber templates. The amount of bio-enzymatically produced silica is related to light-scattering capacity and the resulting organosilica surfaces exhibit a transport mean free path for light as low as 3 μm, and lasing with linewidth below 0.2 nm. The resulting, complex optical material is characterized and modelled to elucidate scattered fields and lasing performance. Tightly-controlled nanofabrication of direct biological inspiration establishes a new concept for the additive manufacturing of engineered light-diffusing materials and photonic components, not addressed by existing technologies

Additive Manufacturing: Applications and Directions in Photonics and Optoelectronics

“…of solid and continuous filaments than can be deposited as individual fibers, as ordered 2D or 3D arrays, or as disordered networks (Figures 9 and 10). [133][134][135][136][137] The main requirement for a successful ES process is having a sufficient amount of entanglements of the polymer chains in the spun solution (viscosities are in the range 10 −1 -10 3 Pa s), such to guarantee the formation of a continuous jet. [138,139] The collector of fibers can be either static or dynamic, and either uniform or patterned.…”

“…Another application of electrospun optical materials, shown in Figure 10d-i, is based on mats of disordered, light-scattering filaments in flexi ble random lasers. [136] Here, an entirely additive method has been developed for the controlled fabrication of hybrid organosilica on top of electrospun fibers, by surface functionalization by Reproduced under the terms of the CC-BY license. [134] Copyright 2013, The Authors.…”

“…The comparison of the light scattering and random lasing properties of pristine electrospun fibers (Figure 10d-f) and of fibers decorated with silica particles (Figure 10g-i) evidences the onset of random lasing only in those samples where silica particles are grown with a specific spatial density. [136] As a result, while pristine fibers can only support amplified spontaneous emission of a superimposed dye-doped polymer layer (Figure 10e,f), the substrates with silica particles might exhibit random lasing modes (Figure 10h,i). Other devices for disordered photonics based on electrospun nanofibers exploit polymer filaments internally doped with either metallic [152] or dielectric [153] nanoparticles, as well as deterministic ring- [154] and cylindrical-shaped [155] lasing resonators with randomly distributed cavity sizes.…”

“…[159] In inkjet printing processes, droplets are ejected through a nozzle on demand, by applying a suitable Reproduced under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND license. [136] Copyright 2018, The Authors. Published by Wiley-VCH.…”

Electrically controlled white laser emission through liquid crystal/polymer multiphases

“…Many cavity architectures have been explored for organic lasers in the visible and near-infrared spectral range, showing low excitation thresholds, narrow linewidths, and broad spectral tunability 11,12 . Demonstrated architectures include various disordered and random structures 16 utilizing complex inhomogeneous materials such as nanofibres 17,18 , organic crystals 19 , biomaterials 20 , and biomimicking and bio-derived materials 21,22 . Different from conventional lasers where an external cavity determines the optical modes, in such systems, the conditions for lasing are affected by multiple scattering in amorphous materials 16,23 .…”