No abstract

Liquid-crystal lasers exhibit narrow linewidth, large coherence area, and low threshold laser emission. Moreover, the wavelength of the laser line can be readily tuned using a variety of different external stimuli, including electric fields. These combined features make them particularly attractive as compact tunable laser light sources. Recent experimental results with regards to the emission characteristics of chiral nematic photonic band-edge lasers are discussed. This type of liquidcrystal laser consists of a self-organizing one-dimensional photonic band structure and a gain medium in the form of a laser dye. Some of the generic features that are observed for these lasers are discussed, including the typical emission linewidth of the laser line, the change in emission energy of the laser for high excitation energies and high pump repetition rates, and the dependence of the excitation threshold and slope efficiency on the cell thickness. In addition, how the performance changes when either the molecular structure of the chiral nematic host or the gain medium is varied is considered. To conclude, results are presented on the laser emission for a wide-temperature-range blue phase I band-edge laser which consists of a self-organizing three-dimensional photonic band structure.

In this study we have fabricated eight different liquid-crystal lasers using the same gain medium but different homologues from the bimesogenic series alpha-(2',4-difluorobiphenyl-4'-yloxy)-omega-(4-cyanobiphenyl-4'-yloxy)alkanes, whereby the number of methylene units in the spacer chain varied from n=5 to n=12. To quantify the performance of these lasers, the threshold energy and the slope efficiency were extracted from the input-output characteristics of each laser. A clear odd-even effect was observed when both the excitation threshold and the slope efficiency were plotted as a function of the number of methylene units in the spacer chain. In all cases, the bimesogen lasers for which n is even exhibit lower threshold energies and higher slope efficiencies than those for which n is odd. These results are then interpreted in terms of the macroscopic physical properties of the liquid-crystalline compounds. In accordance with a previous study [S. M. Morris, A. D. Ford, M. N. Pivnenko, O. Hadeler, and H. J. Coles, Phys. Rev. E. 74, 061709 (2006)], a combination of a large birefringence and high order parameters are found, in the most part, to correlate with low-threshold energy and high slope efficiency. This indicates that the threshold and slope efficiency are dominated by the host macroscopic properties as opposed to intermolecular interactions between the dye and the liquid crystal. However, certain differences in the slope efficiency could not be explained by the birefringence and order parameter values alone. Instead, we find that the slope efficiency is further increased by increasing the elastic constants of the liquid-crystal host so as to decrease the scattering losses incurred by local distortions in the director field under high-energy optical excitation.

We are investigating a series of lattice-matched InxGa1−xAs∕InAsyP1−y double heterostructures with indium concentrations ranging between x=0.53 and x=0.78. The double heterostructures incorporating indium-rich alloys (x>0.53) experience lattice mismatch relative to the InP substrate. Previous work has produced convincing but indirect evidence that the distribution of defect levels in the InxGa1−xAs changes dramatically when the epistructure deviates from the lattice-matched condition. In particular, deep midgap states appear to give way to shallower near-band-edge states with increasing mismatch. Here, we report sub-band-gap photoluminescence measurements that explore these changes directly. We observe a broad low-energy peak in the spectra of the lattice-matched and nearly lattice-matched epistructures that is not present in the more mismatched case. The sub-band-gap emission blueshifts and grows superlinearly with photoexcitation up to and exceeding 1000W∕cm2. This unusual behavior is attributed to transitions between ordinary acceptor levels and deep, defect-related donorlike states. We find no evidence for the shallower defect states that we expected to arise with increasing lattice mismatch.

No abstract