Dome shaped micro-laser encapsulated in a flexible film

In this paper, we demonstrated multimode laser emission from a dome shaped micro-scale resonator encapsulated in a flexible polymer film. The resonator with a radius of ∼60 microns was made of Norland Blocking Adhesive (NBA 107) doped with a solution of rhodamine 6G and ethanol. The dome was encapsulated in a flexible polymeric film made of polydymethylsiloxane (PDMS) with a thickness of 1 mm. The micro-scale laser was optically pumped using a frequency doubled Q-switch Nd:YAG laser with pulse repetition of 10 Hz and pulse duration of 9 ns. Experiments were carried out to investigate the lasing properties of this laser structure. The pumping threshold for multimode laser emission was below 100 µJ cm⁻². The average optical quality factor for all observed laser modes was of the order of 10⁴. Using a fluence of 315.8 µJ cm⁻² it was observed that the intensity of the laser emission dropped by 62% after 5 min of operation. These results showed that these solid state flexible lasers are easy to fabricate and can be integrated into novel flexible photonic devices and novel photonic sensors. (paper)