Circularly polarized laser emission induced in isotropic and achiral dye systems

The production of efficient, tunable, and switchable circularly polarized laser emission would have far reaching implications in optical communications or biophotonics. In this work, it is demonstrated the direct generation of circularly polarized (CP) laser emission in achiral and isotropic dye laser systems without the use of extracavity polarizing elements, and without resorting to chiral dyes, chiral liquid crystal matrices, or interferometric methods. The origin of this ellipticity arises from the dynamic birefringence induced by the strong and polarized laser pumping and the subsequent orientation anisotropy of the excited molecular dipoles. A complete polarimetric characterization of the polarization state of conventional dye laser oscillators as a function of different experimental parameters is performed and it is shown that the generated light always possesses a certain level of circularity that changes in a distinctive way with pump energy and polarization. These results demonstrate that it is possible to generate and modulate CP laser light from efficient and photostable conventional laser dyes.