Threshold improvement in uniformly lying helix cholesteric liquid crystal laser using auxiliary π-conjugated polymer active layer.

We propose a device structure to lower the lasing threshold of a uniformly lying helix cholesteric liquid crystal (ChLC) laser. We place a π-conjugated polymer active layer beneath the ChLC layer to provide auxiliary gain, and demonstrate an improvement in the lasing threshold by a factor of 2.3. We also perform finite difference time domain calculations coupled with rate equations for a four-level system, and clarify the effect of the additional active layer on both the photonic density of states and the inversion population density. Although the addition of an extra layer lowers the photonic density of states, the gain provided by the auxiliary layer is sufficient to overcome the losses and decrease the lasing threshold. Our concept is useful for obtaining high-performance ChLC lasers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]