Recent Progress in Gain Materials for Microlasers and Modern Digital Approaches for Biophotonics: From Dyes to Semiconductors

Microlasers are innovative photonics devices that have recently attracted attention for their unique characteristics, including compactness, broad spectral emission, and low lasing threshold. These properties are beneficial in biophotonics as these lasers can interact with biological materials without causing damage, especially for optical biosensing applications. Among the optical materials recently used as gain media in microlasers are organic dyes, rare-earth ions, fluorescent proteins, and semiconductors, including quantum dots and perovskites. Moreover, different optical cavities and current laser configurations have increased the versatility of microlasers. Recently, digital sensing methods based on novel algorithms, machine learning, and neural networks have been combined with microlaser systems to enhance their accuracy and expand their applications. This work provides a comprehensive review of recent progress in microlasers, covering gain media, microcavity types, and their applications in biophotonics, including conventional spectral-based sensing and new digital approaches for the biomedical field.