Biocompatible polymer and protein microspheres with inverse photonic glass structure for random micro-biolasers
Abstract
The miniaturization of random lasers to the micrometer scale is challenging but fundamental for the integration of lasers with photonic integrated circuits and biological tissues. Herein, it is demonstrated that random lasers with a diameter from 30 to 160 μm can be achieved by using a simple emulsion process and selective chemical etching. These tiny random laser sources are made of either dye-doped polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) or bovine serum albumin (BSA) and they are in the form of microporous spheres with monodisperse pores of 1.28 μm in diameter. Clear lasing action is observed when the microporous spheres are optically excited with powers larger than the lasing threshold, which is 154 μJ mm−2 for a 75 μm diameter PVA microporous sphere. The lasing wavelength redshifts 10 nm when the PVA microsphere diameter increases from 34 to 160 μm. For BSA microspheres, the lasing threshold is around 55 μJ mm−2 for a 70 μm diameter sphere and 104 μJ mm−2 for a 35 μm diameter sphere. The simple fabrication process reported allows for detail studies of morphology and size, important for fundamental studies of light–matter interaction in complex media, and applications in photonic integrated circuits, photonic barcoding, and optical biosensing.
Citation
Ta , V D , Caixeiro , S , Saxena , D & Sapienza , R 2021 , ' Biocompatible polymer and protein microspheres with inverse photonic glass structure for random micro-biolasers ' , Advanced Photonics Research , vol. Early View , 2100036 . https://doi.org/10.1002/adpr.202100036
Publication
Advanced Photonics Research
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2699-9293Type
Journal article
Description
This research was funded by Vietnam National Foundation for Science and Technology Development (NAFOSTED) under grant number 103.03-2017.318 and the the EPSRC Standard Grant EP/T027258/1.Collections
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