Tunable Laser Applications, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4

Organic Dye-Doped Polymer-Nanoparticle Tunable Lasers

F. J. Duarte and R. O. James

4.1 Introduction

The first broadly tunable laser was the organic dye laser. The dye laser was discovered in 1966 by Sorokin and Lankard [1] and Schäfer et al. [2]. Dye-doped polymer (DDP) gain media for tunable lasers were introduced shortly afterwards by Soffer and McFarland [3] and Peterson and Snavely [4]. However, due to initial difficulties with laser medium optical inhomogeneities and thermal problems, these media were relegated to the archives, with the exception of some sporadic interest (see, e.g., [5]), until the 1990s [6].

Using a highly homogeneous DDP medium named modified poly(methyl methacrylate) (MPMMA), Duarte [7] reported, for the first ...