Production of lasers by printing. Free Technical Library News

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Production of lasers by printing

13.10.2012

Scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a technology for manufacturing lasers by printing. The development has a very wide range of possible applications, from medical equipment to displays.

Recall that a laser is a device that makes it possible, by using the phenomenon of stimulated emission, to convert the pump energy into the energy of a coherent, monochromatic, polarized and narrowly directed radiation flux. The best-known applications of lasers in modern electronics are optical storage devices and optical communication lines. Lasers for these applications are manufactured using semiconductor technology. In Cambridge, they learned how to "print" lasers from organic materials on any surface.

These lasers have found use in cholesteric liquid crystals (LCs), similar to those used in displays. If they are oriented in a certain way, the helical molecules can serve as an optical resonator - a key component of a laser. It remains to add a fluorescent dye so that, by optically exciting the resonator, laser radiation can be obtained.

Such lasers have been known for a long time, but earlier they were made by placing liquid crystals between two glass plates located at a distance of hundredths of a millimeter from each other. In this case, a special polymer coating of the glass served to align the LC molecules. This is a complex process and the choice of substrate materials is very limited. The achievement of the Cambridge specialists is to simplify this process, as a result of which it became possible to create an array of multi-colored lasers in one step, using the printing method.

With a special inkjet printer, the researchers printed hundreds of dots from an LC based substrate coated with a polymer solution. While drying, the polymer aligned the LC molecules, turning the dots into lasers. Almost any surface can be used as a base, scientists say, and existing printing equipment is potentially suitable for the printing process.

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