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 a 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 a variety of experimental methods (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 poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) layer, the different experimental approaches give a consistent value of K similar or equal to 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. Temporal measurements at the picosecond scale were carried out to support the analysis.