Microfluidic tunable dye laser with integrated mixer and ring resonator

We report on results of design and fabrication of a microfluidic dye laser that consists of a ring resonator, a waveguide for laser emission output, and microfluidic elements for flow control, all integrated on a chip. The optical resonator and the waveguide were obtained by photolithography, whereas microfluidic elements such as channels, valves, and pumps were fabricated by multilayer soft lithography. As results, the prototype device worked with a few nanoliters of Rhodamine 6G dye molecules in ethanol solution and showed a laser threshold of similar to 15 mu J/mm(2) when optically pumped with a frequency doubled Nd:YAG laser at 532 nm wavelength. The modification of the laser output intensity due to photobleaching effect was characterized by changing the dye flow velocity through the cavity. In addition, the emission wavelength of the laser could be easily tuned by changing the dye molecule concentration with the integrated microfluidic elements. (c) American Institute of Physics.