Directional emission of stadium-shaped micro-lasers

The far-field emission of two dimensional (2D) stadium-shaped dielectric cavities is investigated. Micro-lasers with such shape present a highly directional emission. We provide experimental evidence of the dependance of the emission directionality on the shape of the stadium, in good agreement with ray numerical simulations. We develop a simple geometrical optics model which permits to explain analytically main observed features. Wave numerical calculations confirm the results.Comment: 4 pages, 8 figure

Trace formula for dielectric cavities II: Regular, pseudo-integrable, and chaotic examples

Dielectric resonators are open systems particularly interesting due to their wide range of applications in optics and photonics. In a recent paper [PRE, vol. 78, 056202 (2008)] the trace formula for both the smooth and the oscillating parts of the resonance density was proposed and checked for the circular cavity. The present paper deals with numerous shapes which would be integrable (square, rectangle, and ellipse), pseudo-integrable (pentagon) and chaotic (stadium), if the cavities were closed (billiard case). A good agreement is found between the theoretical predictions, the numerical simulations, and experiments based on organic micro-lasers.Comment: 18 pages, 32 figure

Circular dielectric cavity and its deformations

The construction of perturbation series for slightly deformed dielectric circular cavity is discussed in details. The obtained formulae are checked on the example of cut disks. A good agreement is found with direct numerical simulations and far-field experiments.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figure

Gain properties of dye-doped polymer thin films

Hybrid pumping appears as a promising compromise in order to reach the much coveted goal of an electrically pumped organic laser. In such configuration the organic material is optically pumped by an electrically pumped inorganic device on chip. This engineering solution requires therefore an optimization of the organic gain medium under optical pumping. Here, we report a detailed study of the gain features of dye-doped polymer thin films. In particular we introduce the gain efficiency $K$, in order to facilitate comparison between different materials and experimental conditions. The gain efficiency was measured with various setups (pump-probe amplification, variable stripe length method, laser thresholds) in order to study several factors which modify the actual gain of a layer, namely the confinement factor, the pump polarization, the molecular anisotropy, and the re-absorption. For instance, for a 600 nm thick 5 wt\% DCM doped PMMA layer, the different experimental approaches give a consistent value $K\simeq$ 80 cm.MW$^{-1}$. On the contrary, the usual model predicting the gain from the characteristics of the material leads to an overestimation by two orders of magnitude, which raises a serious problem in the design of actual devices. In this context, we demonstrate the feasibility to infer the gain efficiency from the laser threshold of well-calibrated devices. Besides, temporal measurements at the picosecond scale were carried out to support the analysis.Comment: 15 pages, 17 figure

Inferring periodic orbits from spectra of simple shaped micro-lasers

Dielectric micro-cavities are widely used as laser resonators and characterizations of their spectra are of interest for various applications. We experimentally investigate micro-lasers of simple shapes (Fabry-Perot, square, pentagon, and disk). Their lasing spectra consist mainly of almost equidistant peaks and the distance between peaks reveals the length of a quantized periodic orbit. To measure this length with a good precision, it is necessary to take into account different sources of refractive index dispersion. Our experimental and numerical results agree with the superscar model describing the formation of long-lived states in polygonal cavities. The limitations of the two-dimensional approximation are briefly discussed in connection with micro-disks.Comment: 13 pages, 19 figures, accepted for publication in Physical Review

Red-emitting fluorescent Organic Light emitting Diodes with low sensitivity to self-quenching

International audienceConcentration quenching is a major impediment to efficient organic light-emitting devices. We herein report on Organic Light-Emitting Diodes (OLEDs) based on a fluorescent amorphous red-emitting starbust triarylamine molecule (4-di(4'-tert-butylbiphenyl-4-yl)amino-4'-dicyanovinylbenzene, named FVIN), exhibiting a very small sensitivity to concentration quenching. OLEDs are fabricated with various doping levels of FVIN into Alq3, and show a remarkably stable external quantum efficiency of 1.5% for doping rates ranging from 5% up to 40%, which strongly relaxes the technological constraints on the doping accuracy. An efficiency of 1% is obtained for a pure undoped active region, along with deep red emission (x=0.6; y=0.35 CIE coordinates). A comparison of FVIN with the archetypal DCM dye is presented in an identical multilayer OLED structure

Unidirectional light emission from low-index polymer microlasers

We report on experiments with deformed polymer microlasers that have a low refractive index and exhibit unidirectional light emission. We demonstrate that the highly directional emission is due to transport of light rays along the unstable manifold of the chaotic saddle in phase space. Experiments, ray-tracing simulations, and mode calculations show very good agreement.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Diffusion of triplet excitons in an operational Organic Light Emitting Diode

Measurements of the diffusion length L for triplet excitons in small molecular-weight organic semiconductors are commonly carried out using a technique in which a phosphorescent-doped probe layer is set in the vicinity of a supposed exciton generation zone. However, analyses commonly used to retrieve $L$ ignore microcavity effects that may induce a strong modulation of the emitted light as the position of the exciton probe is shifted. The present paper investigates in detail how this technique may be improved to obtain more accurate results for L. The example of 4,4'-bis(carbazol-9-yl)1,1'-biphenyl (CBP) is taken, for which a triplet diffusion length of L=16 +/- 4 nm (at 3 mA/cm2) is inferred from experiments. The influence of triplet-triplet annihilation, responsible for an apparent decrease of L at high current densities, is theoretically investigated, as well as the 'invasiveness' of the thin probe layer on the exciton distribution. The interplay of microcavity effects and direct recombinations is demonstrated experimentally with the archetypal trilayer structure [N,N'-bis(naphthalen-1-yl)-N,N'-bis(phenyl)]-4,4'-diaminobiphenyl (NPB)/CBP/ 2,9-dimethyl-4,7-diphenyl-1,10-phenanthroline (named bathocuproine, BCP). It is shown that in this device holes do cross the NPB/CBP junction, without the assistance of electrons and despite the high energetic barrier imposed by the shift between the HOMO levels. The use of the variable-thickness doped layer technique in this case is then discussed. Finally, some guidelines are given for improving the measure of the diffusion length of triplet excitons in operational OLEDs, applicable to virtually any small molecular-weight material.Comment: Accepted for publication in Physical Review