Photo-Physical Properties of Stilbine-3 (STB-3) Laser Dyes Embedded in Sol-Gel Glasses

Solid-state tunable dye laser materials developed by incorporation of stable laser dye molecules into solid host matrices like polymers, organically modified silicates (ORMOSILS) and porous sol-gel glasses. These materials have technical advantages such as compactness, better manageability and suitability for field measurement. The recent research work with highly porous sol-gel glasses having good transparency in UV-Near UV region used as solid host for solid-state dye laser materials has attracted a great deal of attention because of its high potential utility than polymers. Two different procedure’s are used for incorpoerating the Stilbine-3 (STB-3) laser dyes into porous sol-gel matrices such as dope or dip methods. In dope method dye is mixed at the sol state and drying is carried out afterward;while in dip method matrix is first prepared and the matrix is dipped in desired dye solution. After preparation of these dye embedded sol-gel glasses we studied their spectroscopic properties of using absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy. Along with spectroscopy properties, the studies for longevity or the shelf life and lasing action of these materials were carried out. Laser dye STB-3 incorporated in sol-gel glass samples shows the same result as in methanolic solution.

Comparative Study of Coumarin-120 (C-120) and Stilbine-3 (STB-3) Laser Dyes Doped in Sol-Gel Glasses

In 1967 the first work in solid state dye laser was performed by doping rhodamine dyes in Polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA) materials. Since then some materials like various types of polymers, co-polymers, poly composite glasses have been used as host matrices for doping different laser dyes. Polymers suffer from limited mechanical and thermal stability. Hence glasses can be the alternative hosts. However, because of high processing temperature leading to permanent destruction of dye molecules, the conventional glass preparation technique is not suitable for the introduction of organic laser dyes. This difficulty can be overcome by introducing the laser dye molecules in sol-gel glass which is prepared at low temperature. Recent work with sol-gel glasses shows that these glasses may prove to be better materials compared to polymeric materials because glasses being hard, best optically transparency in Near UV-UV and Visible region and show better photostability. In this research work we reported, comparative study of the photophysical properties of Coumarin-120 (C-120) belonging to 7-aminocoumarin family having two hydrogen atoms attached to the N atom at the 7-position, with Stilbene-3 (STB-3) in three types of HCl catalyzed SiO2 sol-gel matrices prepared by Method I, Method II and Method III respectively.