Phys.org October 5, 2021
A random laser has many degrees of freedom that are not available in conventional cavity lasers. Based on this discovery, an international team of researchers (Israel, France) showed that laser emission can be simply controlled by shaping the pump profile that provides the gain inside the scattering medium. This is done optically with total flexibility. They found that selective excitation significantly reduces the lasing threshold, while lasing efficiency is greatly improved. Their spatial locations are critical to boost laser power efficiency. By efficiently suppressing the spatial hole burning effect, they could turn on the optimally outcoupled random lasing modes. The method can be applied to design highly efficient and stable random microlasers, where the random and non-Hermitian nature of the lasers offers unprecedented degrees of freedom. The demonstration opens the road to the exploration of linear and nonlinear mode interactions in the presence of gain, as well as disorder-engineering for laser applications…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ
Schematics of the experimental setup. Credit: Optica Vol. 8, Issue 8, pp. 1033-1039 (2021)Â