Resonators and materials for organic lasers based on energy transfer

Optically pumped lasers have been fabricated with organic/polymeric materials capable of charge transport. The active materials employed are doped films with small molecule hosts and dye, oligomer, and conjugated polymer emitters. In these materials, the excited states created in the host are transferred nonradiatively to the guest molecules which are the emitters. This energy transfer results in very low absorption losses at the emission wavelength and relatively low-threshold powers for the onset of stimulated emission. Such gain media have been successfully included in many types of resonators including whispering-gallery mode, photonic bandgap, and distributed Bragg reflector (DBR) based resonators. A number of novel patterning and fabrication procedures have been developed for organic-based lasers.