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Laser emission from a dye-doped cholesteric liquid crystal pumped by another

cholesteric liquid crystal laser

Article  in  Applied Physics Letters · October 2004

DOI: 10.1063/1.1806561

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APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS VOLUME 85, NUMBER 16 18 OCTOBER 2004

Laser emission from a dye-doped cholesteric liquid crystal pumped

by another cholesteric liquid crystal laser
Andro Chanishvili, Guram Chilaya, and Gia Petriashvili
Institute of Cybernetics of Georgian Academy of Sciences, Euli str. 5, 380086, Tbilisi, Georgia
Riccardo Barberi, Roberto Bartolino, Gabriella Cipparrone,a) and Alfredo Mazzulla
Licryl-Liquid Crystals Laboratory, INFM Research Unit of Cosenza c/o Physics Department,
University of Calabria, 87036 Arcavacata di Rende (CS), Italy
(Received 29 March 2004; accepted 17 August 2004)
We report the observation of laser emission from a luminescent dye-doped cholesteric liquid crystal
(CLC) excited by another dye-doped CLC laser. The idea is based on the cascade of two CLC cells
containing two different dyes where the emission band of the first overlaps the absorption band of
the second. This system of low threshold mirrorless lasers emphasizes the main advantages of these
organic materials for lasing applications and identifies a simple laser device. Preliminary
characterizations of these CLC laser systems produce evidence of remarkable features that suggest
fascinating developments. The main aspects are related to the wavelength tunability of the laser
emission and to the miniaturization of the device. © 2004 American Institute of Physics.
[DOI: 10.1063/1.1806561]

Light-induced effects in cholesteric liquid crystals
(CLCs) have been extensively studied during the last two
decades.1 During the last five years much interest has been
devoted to the photonic properties of CLCs highlighting a
new field of liquid crystal science and technology.2 The CLC
are materials with selective reflection properties (maximum
of selective reflection at wavelength ␭max = pn and bandwidth
⌬␭ = p⌬n, where n is the refractive index, ⌬n is the material
optical anisotropy, and p is the helical pitch) and capability
to change the selective reflection range (the helical pitch).
For these reasons CLCs support the possibility to assemble a
wavelength tunable distributed feedback laser. Generation of
light in dye-doped CLC was obtained for the first time in
Ref. 3. The idea to build a distributed feedback laser by
using CLC was predicted in Ref. 4 and the theoretical analy-
sis of distributed feedback laser generation in a dye doped
CLC was made in Ref. 5. The consideration of chiral LCs as
a one-dimensional photonic gap medium promoted explana-
tion of the appearance of laser emission near the edge of the
selective reflection band and also stimulated the observation
and the investigation of this emission in photonic band gap
material in thermotropic6–12 and lyotropic CLCs,13 ferroelec-
tric chiral smectic LCs,14,15 polymer networks,16,17
elastomers,18 and blue phases.19 In these systems the lasing
tunability was achieved by several mechanisms: changing
the chiral dopant concentration, by temperature variation, by
mechanical stress, applying an electric field or by phototrans-
formation of the optically active chiral dopant.3,6–18
In this letter we obtain laser emission from luminescent
dye doped CLC excited by another dye doped CLC laser.
The work is based on the simple idea of employing two
liquid crystal cells containing two different dyes, with the
prescription that the emission band of the first one overlaps
the absorption band of the second. This idea comes from the
concept of energy transfer already employed in laser dye
mixtures to improve efficiency and spectral range tunability
a)
Electronic mail: cipparrone@fis.unical.it
of dye lasers.20,21 Mixtures of donor and acceptor dyes are
also used in distributed feedback dye laser to obtain lasing
without an external optical element, where geometry with the
interfering pump beams is necessary.22
Even if the idea is suggested by the well-known excita-
tion transfer processes, in the present work the pairs of dyes
are used separately in an unconventional mirrorless resona-
tor, namely they are dissolved in CLC cells having appropri-
ate helical pitch. This cascade of low threshold mirrorless
lasers emphasizes the main advantages of CLCs as organic
materials for lasing application and identifies a kind of
simple and tiny laser system. The appropriate design of the
device components, including the materials, allows a wide
wavelength tuning by changing just one element.
For the CLC mixtures commercially available compo-
nents were used: the nematic liquid crystal MLC-6816 and
the optically active chiral dopant MLC-6248, both from
Merck. The first mixture, with concentrations of 64% nem-
atic and 36% chiral dopant, gives selective reflection peak at
a wavelengths of 420 nm. To this mixture was added 0.6% of
blue luminescent dye 2 , 5 – 2 , 5-thiophenediylbis (5-tert-
butyl-1,3-benzoxazole). The chemical structure, the absorp-
tion, and luminescence spectra of the blue dye are shown in
Figs. 1(a) and 1(b), respectively. The second mixture has
concentrations of 68.5% nematic and 31.5% chiral dopant,
and gives selective reflection peak at a wavelength of
480 nm. This mixture was doped with 0.6% of green lumi-
nescent dye 4-(3-methoxypropylamino)-(3-methoxypropyl)-
naphthalimide. The absorption and luminescence spectra,
and the chemical structure of the green dye are shown in
Figs. 2(a) and 2(b), respectively. As can be seen from Figs.
1(a) and 2(a), the luminescence spectrum of blue dye well
overlaps the absorption spectrum of the green dye.
The mixtures were sandwiched between glass plates
coated with rubbed polyimide in order to obtain a planar
alignment of the samples; films of 40 ␮m thickness were
assembled. Photoexcitation investigations have been per-
formed using as the pump beam of the first CLC cell the
third harmonic of a Q-switched Nd:YAG laser (Continuum,

0003-6951/2004/85(16)/3378/3/$22.00 3378 © 2004 American Institute of Physics

Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 85, No. 16, 18 October 2004
FIG. 1. The absorption and emission spectra of 2,5–2,5-thiophenediylbis(5-
tert-butyl-1,3-benzoxazole), blue dye (a), and its chemical structure (b).
Surelite II). The pulse wavelength, width, and repetition rate
were 355 nm, 4 ns, and 5 Hz, respectively. The excitation
beam energy was strongly attenuated combining a ␭ / 2 wave
plate, a polarizer, and several neutral density filters.
Experiments were performed with the setup shown in
Fig. 3. A lens, of focal length of 15 cm, focuses the laser
beam in order to reduce the spot size on the cell to a few
hundreds micrometers. The Nd:YAG laser beam impinges
out from the normal on the CLC cell, an usual geometry for
those experiments. A lens doublet, a microscope ocular
(Leitz periplan GW 6.3⫻) with 20 mm total focus length
and spot size of a few hundreds of micrometers, collects and
focuses the laser beam emitted from the first cell onto the
second one. An optical fiber coupled to the spectrometer,
Avantes Fiberoptics model AVS-S2000 with 1.5 nm resolu-
tion, is used to measure the spectra of both the pump and the
laser emission from the cells.
At around 200 nJ pumping energy, the first cell emits
laser light at 438 nm wavelength, and the released energy is
FIG. 2. The absorption and emission spectra of 4-(3-methoxypropylamino)-
(3-methoxypropyl)-naphthalimide, green dye (a), and its chemical structure
(b).
Chanishvili et al. 3379
FIG. 3. Experimental setup.
enough to induce laser emissions in the second cell. Lasing
from the second CLC sample has a 493 nm wavelength. Fig-
ure 4 shows the lasing spectra of both the pump and the cell
emissions. Lasing takes place at the resonance located at the
long wavelength edge of the reflection band for both
samples, as foreseen from the CLC emission.
The detected linewidths of about 2 nm full width at half
maximum are well above the actual width of the lines, be-
cause detection is limited by the spectral resolution of the
experimental setup. The differences between the linewidths
in Fig. 4 are only artifacts.
The photograph of Fig. 5(a), from right to left, shows the
first cell followed by the lens doublet and the second cell.
The spots on the screen, placed 10 cm away from the second
cell, are the blue laser beam emitted from the first cell, and
the green laser beam emitted from the second cell. The green
spot size is about 5 mm diameter. It should be noted that
both cells are mirrorless laser devices; this emphasizes the
very small dimension of the whole apparatus, composed sim-
ply by two CLC cells and a couple of lenses.
The simple composition of the device suggests possibili-
ties for fascinating developments. The easy assembling of
CLC cells with different pitches can be successfully used in
order to obtain laser emission at several wavelengths just by
changing one or both elements of the cascade. Moreover, the
wide possibilities of changing the architecture of each CLC
sample can be employed to improve the features of the de-
vice, such as the tunability.
A possibility is to use a second cell with a pitch
gradient.23 This method allows a fine-tuning of the laser
wavelength by a simple translation of the CLC cell with
respect to the exciting beam. In this way the tunability of the
second CLC laser emission would be extended to a range of
about 40 nm. At the same time investigations should be ad-
dressed to the miniaturization of the laser system. As shown
FIG. 4. Lasing spectra of the UV pump 共355 nm兲, the emission from the
first cell 共438 nm兲, and the emission from the second cell 共493 nm兲. The
relative intensities are not comparable to each other.
3380 Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 85, No. 16, 18 October 2004 Chanishvili et al.

FIG. 5. (Color) Laser system photographs. The cascade of the two CLC cells (a). On the screen are visible the two laser spots, as can be seen also in the
enlargement (b). The larger one is the blue laser emitted by the first cell and transmitted through the second cell. The second spot is the green emission from
the second cell.

7
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