Scientists at the University of St. Andrews (University of St. Andrews) in the United Kingdom recently said they had made a "significant breakthrough" in the decades-long challenge of developing compact organic semiconductor laser technology, according to Mames Consulting. An OLED with world-record light output was first fabricated and then integrated with a polymer laser structure. The new laser emits a green laser beam consisting of short pulses of light. The paper, published in the journal Nature, explains how the team at the University of St Andrews overcame common organic semiconductor problems such as low current density and "intolerable losses caused by injecting charge into the gain medium". "The loss reduction was achieved by developing an integrated device structure that effectively combines an OLED with extremely high internal light generation capability with a polymer distributed feedback laser," the paper States. Under electrical driving of the integrated structure, a threshold of light output versus drive current can be observed with a narrow emission spectrum and a laser beam formed above the threshold. The results provide an organic electronic device that has not been demonstrated before, and show that indirect electrical pumping of OLEDs is a very effective way to achieve electrically driven organic semiconductor lasers. This provides a way for visible lasers to find applications in spectroscopy, metrology, and sensing. The paper concludes: "Researchers have demonstrated an integrated device approach to electrically driven lasers in organic semiconductors, addressing an important challenge in organic optoelectronics.". "This approach overcomes major difficulties common to direct electrical injection attempts with organic or hybrid perovskite lasers, while retaining a working advantage."
