First-order imprinted organic distributed feedback lasers

The excellent luminescence and gain properties of substituted oligothiophenes are exploited to imprint one-dimensional photonic crystals for the fabrication of printed distributed feedback (DFB) cavities. We demonstrate the dry-printing of organic semiconductor lasers, carrying out the realization of a complete device by a single nanofabrication step, which can be perfectly integrated with other existing planar semiconductor processing and etching technologies. In particular, a thiophene-based pentamer with very good amplified spontaneous emission and optical gain properties was used to fabricate a single-mode, first-order DFB lasers exhibiting an emission with a linewidth of 1.1 nm at about 636 nm for excitation fluences larger than 27 μJ/cm2. These results clearly indicate that substituted oligothiophene-S,S- dioxides are promising candidates for solid-state lasers realizable by emerging nanopatteming technologies.