Lasers Based on Semiconducting Organic Materials

Abstract

Light‐emitting organic materials continue to assume increasing significance in the field of semiconductor laser research, and the Figure depicts several structures that have been demonstrated using organic semiconductors. This review provides a description of the fundamental aspects of lasers and a historical overview of their development, followed by a discussion of the recent progress in optically pumped lasers, and their implications for laser technology.

Photophysics of a poly(phenylenevinylene) with alternatingmeta-phenylene andpara-phenylene rings

“…The question of whether polymers can be used successfully as a solid state laser material has raised numerous important issues in polymer science: one being excited state absorption by charged species along the polymer backbone. 40 A high density of charge carriers with excited state absorption close to the emission maxima would quench any lasing action and has been highlighted as a major problem in fabricating an electrically pumped organic laser.…”

Photonic mode dispersion of a two-dimensional distributed feedback polymer laser

“…Various materials have been studied, including conjugated polymers [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] and small semiconducting molecules doped with laser dyes. 18 -25 Such materials can exhibit strong optical gain over broad spectral ranges throughout the visible, and so are well suited for use in tuneable lasers 9,11,22 or broadband amplifiers.…”

“…17 To date, work in this area has involved only optically pumped lasers, although the prospect of a plastic diode laser simply fabricated from solution remains a much sought-after goal. 4,5,20 An important challenge in the physics relevant to this goal involves understanding how photonic microstructures influence light emission from organic semiconductors. The simple processing of organics allows them to be easily fashioned into complex wavelength-scale structures.…”

Fluorene-based macromolecular nanostructures and nanomaterials for organic (opto)electronics

“…In the last two decades, various functions of plastic devices have been demonstrated, including polymer light-emitting diodes (PLEDs) [4,5] for commercial flat panel displays and white solid lighting sources, polymer solar cells (PSCs) [6,7], polymer thin-film transistors [8][9][10][11], polymer lasers [12][13][14][15], polymer photodetectors [16][17][18][19], polymer memory for information storage [20][21][22][23][24][25] and others [26][27][28]. In this area, the basic open question pertaining to commercialization is to fabricate low-cost, stable and high-performance thin-film devices.…”

“…The multi-levelled molecular substructures of PF derivatives, such as dialkylfluorenes (F-I), heterofluorenes (F-II) [32][33][34], fused or curved fluorenes (F-III) [35], diarylfluorenes (F-IV) [36,37] and spirofluorenes (F-V) [38,39] (figure 1), have become an ideal platform to demonstrate the four-element principle that contains the p-n covalent design (also called the D-A design) [40][41][42][43], steric design [44,45], conformation and topology design [15,[46][47][48] and supramolecular interaction [25,31,49,50]. Previously, many efforts have been made to clarify low-energy green emission bands (also called g-bands) in PF-based electroluminescent thin films for application in high-performance devices [86].…”