Building a laser source from a simple disordered environment is the challenge of research on random lasers.
Although they are much less difficult to achieve than the usual devices based on the association of parallel mirrors or periodic media, mastering their characteristics is a priori a challenge.
The Department of Physics and Astronomy of Seoul National University (South Korea) and the Nanotechnologies Institute of Lyon have just demonstrated that a clever control of the geometry of a photonic crystal and its degree of disorder allows to model independently major characteristics such as the wavelength and surface of these lasers.
These results, published this month in Nature Photonics, show that a well-controlled disorder offers unprecedented degrees of freedom to control the properties of this new class of intrinsically random devices.
Myungjae Lee, Ségolène Callard, Christian Seassal and Heonsu Jeon, Taming of random lasers, Nature Photonics volume 13, pages 445–448 (2019)
