Aerosol-based coherent random laser

Opt Lett. 2012 Mar 15;37(6):1053-5. doi: 10.1364/OL.37.001053.

Abstract

We demonstrate coherent random lasing from an aerosol of dye-doped microdroplets in air. The aerosol is in the form of a linear array of polydisperse, arbitrarily shaped, and randomly spaced microdroplets with average dimensions of about 30 μm. Upon optical excitation, ultranarrow lasing modes were observed in the emission along the axis of the linear array, while the transverse emission exhibited intrascatterer resonance peaks. Direct spatiospectral imaging and lasing threshold studies confirmed the origin of the lasing peaks to be from spatial modes that extended over the array of the polydisperse microdroplets.