Light amplification in organic thin films using cascade energy transfer

There is currently renewed interest in the development of lasers using solid-state organic and polymeric materials as the gain media. These materials have a number of properties that make them good candidates for such applications — for example, emission bands that are displaced (via a Stokes shift) from absorption bands, and the ease with which the emitting species can be embedded in a suitable host material1,2,3,4,5. But despite these advantages, the threshold power densities required for light amplification that have been reported so far have been high6,7,8. Here we describe an approach, based on energy transfer between molecular species, that can lower the threshold for stimulated emission and laser action while improving markedly the waveguiding properties of the active material. In our materials, an initial molecular excited state is generated in the host compound by absorption of light; this state is then resonantly and non-radiatively transferred down in energy (through one or more steps) between suitably matched dye molecules dispersed in the host, so ensuring that the absorption losses at the final emission wavelengths are very small. Such composite gain media provide provide broad tunability of the emission wavelength, and also decouple the optical emission properties from the transport properties, so providing greater flexibility for the design of future electrically driven device structures.