Engineering of Solid-State Random Lasing in Nanoporous Anodic Alumina Photonic Crystals

Random lasing provides new opportunities to engineer cost-competitive, highly controllable, and integrable light sources for a broad range of photonic technologies such as sensing, hyperspectral imaging, high-resolution spectroscopic analysis, and photonic circuits. In this study, we engineer the self-organized structure of nanoporous anodic alumina (NAA) through the electrochemical oxidation of aluminum to generate a palette of model nanoporous platforms with tailored, hexagonally distributed, straight cylindrical nanopores. The inner surface of these platforms is functionalized with a model organic fluorophore via micellar solubilization of a surfactant. The resultant organic–inorganic composite structures provide model platforms to develop optically pumped solid-state random lasers with well-resolved, intense lasing bands. The effect of NAA’s geometric features on the random lasing characteristics of these model platforms is elucidated by precisely engineering its nanopore diameter, nanopore length, interpore distance, and ordering. Structural engineering of NAA makes it possible to tune and maximize random-lasing emissions, resulting in strong, polarized lasing at ∼628 nm characterized by a remarkably high-quality-gain product of ∼1433, a polarization quality of ∼0.9, and a lasing threshold of ∼0.87 mJ pulse–1.