Optical Control of Microspherical Laser Oscillation by Transient Absorption

A new method for optical control of a lasing process within a microspherical particle has been proposed. A microparticle was doped with a dye for lasing, and with a transient absorber that quenched lasing emission only when excited by light. The quality factor of a microspherical cavity was reduced by the transient absorption loss which could be arbitrarily varied with the excitation intensity, so that the lasing emission intensity was controllable with excitation light. On-off switching of microspherical laser oscillation and picosecond pulse shortening with optical Q-switching are demonstrated as preliminary experiments.