UCLA researchers together with Canon have found a way to force long luminescent polymer chains into giving off polarized light. They found that by using a tight glass silica matrix through which they drew the polymer chains, they could prohibit them from curling up. The holes in the matrix are so small there just isn’t any room for curling, thus the polymers remains straight and all pointing in the same direction. This means that they will absorb and give off polarized light.
Much of the research has focused on producing cheap, organic and efficient lasers as the polymers also have the ability to confine the light without the use of any exterior mirrors or other optical parts.
“Our new materials exploit the fact that the polymer chains are all lined up to make them into lasers that function very differently from lasers made out of random polymers,” professor of chemistry Benjamin J. Schwartz said. “Our materials don’t need mirrors to function as lasers, because the material that’s lasing is also serving to confine the light.”
Both the polymers and the silica matrix are cheap to manufacture and can fairly easily be produced at a large scale. And thanks to the alignment of the polymers and the ability to confine light the new material has up to 20 times easier to lase than polymer samples with a random order. This is important because polarized light usually requires quite expensive equipment.
BUt what is perhaps most interesting to us is that the research also opens up the possibility of brighter polarized sources for displays in products with LED-type displays, such as mobile phones, laptops and PDAs.
“If you take an inexpensive light source with which you could excite the aligned polymer chains and get the chains to reemit, you potentially have a more efficient way to generate polarized light.” professor Sarah Tolbert said. “This would allow displays to be brighter with less power consumption, and you could get longer battery life.”
