Adaptive pumping for spectral control of random lasers
By N. Bachelard, Sylvain Gigan, X. Noblin, P. Sebbah. Nature Physics, 2013
190 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Random lasers generate the optical feedback required for stimulated emission by scattering light from disordered particles. Their inherent randomness, however, makes controlling the emission wavelength difficult. It is now shown that this problem can be remedied by carefully matching the pump laser to the specific random medium. The concept is applied to a one-dimensional optofluidic device, but could also be applicable to other random lasers. A laser is not necessarily a sophisticated device: pumping an amplifying medium randomly filled with scatterers makes a perfectly viable ‘random laser’. The absence of mirrors greatly simplifies laser design, but control over the emission wavelength and directionality is lost, seriously hindering prospects1,2,3,4 for this otherwise simple laser. Recently, we proposed an approach to tame random lasers5, inspired by coherent light control in complex media6. Here, we implement this method in an optofluidic random laser7 where modes are spatially extended and overlap, making individual mode selection impossible, a priori. We show experimentally that control over laser emission can be regained even in this extreme case. By actively shaping the optical pump within the random laser, single-mode operation at any selected wavelength is achieved with spectral selectivity down to 0.06 nm and more than 10 dB side-lobe rejection. This method paves the way towards versatile tunable and controlled random lasers as well as the taming of other laser sources.
Subfields: Acoustics and Ultrasonics, Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b5ca7969b0cca79022a087d720ddae2545143349
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Acoustics and Ultrasonics
In Artificial Intelligence
In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Citations in the corpus
- Light fields in complex media: Mesoscopic scattering meets wave control (2017, background): “…of concept that have already been given for new devices, be it for compact spectrometers (Redding et al., 2013a), ultrafast switches (Strudley et al., 2014), tunable random lasers (Bachelard et al., 2014; Hisch et al., 2013) as well as for light harvesting (Riboli et al., 2014; Vynck et al., 2012).”