Photoluminescence and Lasing from Deoxyribonucleic Acid Thin Films Doped With Sulforhodamine

摘要

Biological materials represent a rich and mainly untapped resource for photonic and electronic devices. Biomaterials have many attractive features: unusual optical and electrical properties that are not readily reproduced in manmade materials, they are a widely available and replenishable resource, and they are biodegradable and environmentally friendly. The integration of biological materials with semiconductors is a particularly fertile area with many applications. Because of its primacy in biological reproduction, DNA has been a subject of investigation by molecular biologists and other life scientists for several decades. More recently, the unique nanostructure and replication properties of DNA molecules have started to be investigated by physical scientists and engineers interested in incorporating these properties in new or improved devices. Studies of the electro-optical properties of DNA-based materials have opened doors to novel device implementation. For example, organic-light emitting diodes (OLED) containing DNA electron blocking layers have been recently reported to exhibit significant enhancements in luminance and luminous efficiency compared to conventional OLED without the DNA layer. Organic solid-state lasers using a variety of host and lumophore combinations have made steady progress in the last decade in terms of wavelength tunability, reduced threshold, and increased. Polymeric matrices have been found to be an extremely important factor in influencing lasing properties such as intensity, threshold, and optical gain. DNA is reported to be an efficient host for certain luminescent organic and organometallic molecules in both solution and solid-state thin films. In this paper we report on the use of DNA as a host material for optically pumped organic solid-state lasers.