Fabrication of defect-free nanoimprinted photonic crystals for laser applications

The fabrication of two-dimensional photonic crystals by nanoimprint lithography is established to realize lasing oscillations at three band edge frequencies. The optically pumped lasers are based on a dye-chromophore-loaded polymer matrix on a transparent substrate. A two-dimensional plane-wave algorithm was used to design the band-edge lasers showing a good agreement with the experimental lasing frequencies. These results show that nanoimprint lithography is well-suited to the one-step fabrication of two-dimensional active-polymer photonic crystals.