This is a brief guide to the literature of efficient organic lasers. The papers and books included here refer to efficient solid-state organic gain media as well as narrow-linewidth tunable laser oscillators engineered using efficient organic gain media. As a reference point it should be indicated that the efficiency of well-designed standard laser-pumped organic dye laser systems is known to reach the 50-60% range (see, for example, Dye laser Principles or High-Power Dye lasers). In fact, good efficiency in the generation of high-power tunable visible radiation is one of the well-known advantages offered by dye lasers.

However, in the recent literature some language inflation has transformed the adjective "efficient" into "highly efficient." Thus, "good efficiency" should be equivalent to "high efficiency" and so on. Hence, in the interest of equivalence we have entitled this publication using contemporaneous language.

• F. J. Duarte, Solid-state multiple-prism grating dye laser oscillators, Appl. Opt. 33, 3857-3860 (1994). [Broadband laser efficiency is reported at better than 40%].
• A. Maslyukov, S. Sokolov, M. Kaivola, K. Nyholm, and S. Popov, Solid state dye laser with modified poly(methyl methacrylate)-doped active elements, Appl. Opt. 34, 1516-1518 (1995). [Broadband laser efficiencies reported to approach 65%].
• F. J. Duarte and R. O. James, Tunable solid-state lasers incorporating dye-doped polymer-nanoparticle gain media, Opt. Lett. 28, 2088-2090 (2003). [Broadband laser efficiencies are reported at 49% for dye-doped PMMA gain media and at 63% for dye-doped polymer-nanoparticle gain media].

• F. J. Duarte and L. W. Hillman (Eds.), Dye Laser Principles (Academic, New York, 1990).
• F. P. Schäfer (Ed.), Dye Lasers, 3rd Ed. (Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1990).
• F. J. Duarte (Ed.), High Power Dye Lasers (Springer-Verlag, Berlin,1991).
• F. J. Duarte (Ed.), Selected Papers on Dye Lasers (SPIE, Bellingham Wa, 1992).
• F. J. Duarte (Ed.), Tunable Lasers Handbook (Academic, New York, 1995).

• F. J. Duarte (Ed.), Tunable Lasers Handbook (Academic, New York, 1995).
• F. J. Duarte, Tunable Laser Optics (Elsevier Academic, New York, 2003).
• F. J. Duarte (Ed.), Tunable Laser Applications, 2nd Ed. (CRC, New York, 2009).
• F. J. Duarte, Tunable Laser Optics, 2nd Ed. (CRC, New York, 2015).
• F. J. Duarte (Ed.), Tunable Laser Applications, 3rd Ed. (CRC, New York, 2016).

These compact dispersive laser oscillators have been shown to yield beam divergences ~ 1.5 times the diffraction limit and single-longitudinal-mode emission at laser linewidths of ~ 350 MHz. Emission pulses are in the ns regime at peak powers in the kW range. Continuous tunability has been demonstrated in the 550-600 nm region.

In these solid-state tunable lasers the gain medium is an organic-dye-doped polymer matrix. Usually this matrix is a highly homogenous form of poly(methyl-methacrylate) (PMMA). An additional example of a polymer used as matrix in the gain media of a tunable polymer laser is HEMA:MMA.

• F. J. Duarte, Solid-state multiple-prism grating dye laser oscillators, Appl. Opt. 33, 3857-3860 (1994).
• F. J. Duarte, Solid-state dispersive dye laser oscillator: very compact cavity, Opt. Commun. 117, 480-484 (1995).
• F. J. Duarte, Multiple-prism near-grazing-incidence grating solid-state dye laser oscillator, Opt. Laser Technol. 29, 513-516 (1997).
• F. J. Duarte, T. S. Taylor, A. Costela, I. Garcia-Moreno, and R. Sastre, Long-pulse narrow-linewidth dispersive solid-state dye-laser oscillator, Appl. Opt. 37, 3987-3989 (1998).
• F. J. Duarte, Multiple-prism grating solid-state dye laser oscillator: optimized architecture, Appl. Opt. 38, 6347-6349 (1999).
• F. J. Duarte, Multiple-return-pass beam divergence and the linewidth equation, Appl. Opt. 40, 3038 - 3041 (2001).
• F. J. Duarte, Tunable Laser Optics (Elsevier Academic, New York, 2003) Chapter 7.
• F. J. Duarte ans R. O. James, in Tunable Laser Applications, 2nd Ed. (CRC, New York, 2009) Chapter 4.
• F. J. Duarte, Tunable organic dye lasers: physics and technology of high-performance liquid and solid-state narrow-linewidth oscillators, Progress in Quantum Electronics 36, 29-50 (2012).

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Page published on the 17th of July, 2010.

Updated on the 7th of December, 2018.