Optofluidic circular grating distributed feedback dye laser

We demonstrate an optically pumped surface emitting optofluidic dye laser using a second-order circular grating distributed feedback resonator. We present a composite bilayer soft lithography technique specifically developed for the fabrication of our dye laser and investigate a hybrid polymer material system [poly(dimethylsiloxane)/perfluoropolyether] to construct high-resolution Bragg gratings. Our lasers emit single frequency light at low lasing thresholds of 6 µJ/mm^2. These optofluidic dye lasers can serve as low-cost and compact coherent light sources that are fully integrated within microfluidic analysis chips and provide an efficient approach to construct compact spectroscopy systems