Flexible and portable random laser devices: integration of electrospun fibers and doped polymeric substrates

Abstract

The development of flexible optical and photonic devices has attracted growing interest due to their promising applications in optical sensing and light-emitting technologies. Among these, devices based on random lasers stand out for their simple fabrication and unique emission properties. However, despite advances using various scattering centers, the use of electrospun fibers as scattering centers for random laser emission is still limited. Here, we propose a novel random laser design by incorporating electrospun polyacrylonitrile (PAN) fibers as scattering centers within a flexible, portable polymeric substrate doped with rhodamine 6G as the gain medium. The resulting platform exhibits efficient random lasing with spectral narrowing below 10 nm [full width at half-maximum (fwhm)] and low excitation thresholds near 2 × 10−4 J. These results demonstrate a robust, easy-to-fabricate, and flexible random laser system with potential applications in optical sensors and photonic devices.