Dye-doped fluorinated polyimides as efficient long-lived wave-guide lasers and amplifiers

The use of organic wave-guide lasers based on dye-doped polymers has attracted much attention over the last decade for their applications in integrated photonics. These systems assure wide tunability and high efficiency. A major drawback of these devices is their limited operational lifetime, and any realistic application passes for extending it. It is known that an improvement in the polymer thermal conductivity reduces dye degradation, and thus assures an increase in the device's lifetime. Fluorinated Polyimides (FPI) are polymers which have excellent thermal properties and, in some cases, the transparency demanded by a laser material. Some FPI have been already used as passive [1] and active [2,3] wave-guides, mostly in the IR region, but, to the best of our knowledge, there have been no previous studies on their photostability properties.