Solution-processable Organic Lasers and Their Future Prospects

Organic lasers have attracted intense attention over the years because of their promising properties such as color tunability, flexibility, and low cost, compared to inorganic counterparts. Today, a wide variety of organic dyes and organic semiconductor laser materials are available, which can lase from UV to visible and NIR regions. One of the critical advantages of organic laser materials compared to inorganic laser materials is that the laser emission can be finely tuned via a small alteration of the organic luminophores. Most of these materials can also be processed via vacuum deposition and solution processing techniques by designing the proper molecular structures. For low-cost and large-scale production of organic lasers, solution-processable techniques are more favorable in terms of both energy-saving and production cost issues. In this chapter, we summarize recent works on solution-processable organic lasers and their prospects.