Random lasing from dye-doped negative liquid crystals using ZnO nanoparticles as tunable scatters

This work demonstrates the realization of a lasing in scattering media,which contains dispersive solution of Zn O nanoparticles（NPs） and laser dye 4-dicyanomethylene-2-methyle-6-（p-dimethylaminostyryl）-4H-pyran（DCM） in negative liquid crystals（LCs） that was injected into a cell.The lasing intensity of the dye-doped negative LC laser can be tuned from low to high if the NPs concentration is increased.The tunability of the laser is attributable to the clusters-sensitive feature in effective refractive index of the negative LCs.Such a tunable negative liquid crystal laser can be used in the fabrication of new optical sources,optical communication,and liquid crystal laser displays.

Temperature-tunable lasing in negative dielectric chiral nematic liquid crystal

In this work, negative dielectric nematic liquid crystal SLC 12V620-400, chiral dopant S811, and laser dye DCM are used to prepare dye-doped chiral nematic liquid crystal laser sample. In order to investigate temperature-tunable lasing in negative dielectric chiral nematic liquid crystal, we measure the transmission and lasing spectrum of this sample. The photonic band gap （PBG） is observed to red shift with its width reducing from 71.2 nm to 40.2 nm, and its short-wavelength band edge moves 55.3 nm while the long-wavelength band edge only moves 24.9 nm. The wavelength of output laser is found to red shift from 614.4 nm at 20 ~C to 662.8 nm at 67 ~C, which is very different from the previous experimental phenomena. The refractive indices, parallel and perpendicular to the director in chiral nematic liquid crystal have different dependencies on temperature. The experiment shows that the pitch of this chiral nematic liquid crystal increases with the increase of temperature. The decrease in the PBG width, different shifts of band edges, and the red shift of laser wavelength are the results of refractive indices change and pitch thermal elongation.