Bichromatic Laser Dye As a Photonic Random Number Generator

This Article describes the effect of the excitation wavelength on the spectra of random laser emission obtained in a dye-doped polymeric system, composed of a PMMA layer and a laser dye exhibiting a bichromatic gain profile, the 3-(2,2-dicyanoethenyl)-1-phenyl-4,5-dihydro-1H-pyrazole (DCNP). We are showing that the change of pumping wavelength can be used to switch the laser emission between particular lasing bands and control the relative intensity between them if the bichromatic light amplification is achieved. We present that the random lasing phenomenon can strongly influence the resulting bichromatic emission, randomly selecting the dominating lasing band. Mentioned random band switching behavior was investigated using a statistical approach, indicating that the obtained distribution is dependent on the excitation wavelength. This feature can be used to design new types of laser-based optical random number generators that can find applications in integrated optical logic devices. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first demonstration of an optical random number generator based on the bichromatic laser dye described in the literature.