PM567-Doped solid dye lasers based on PMMA

Polymers are a kind of attractive hosts for laser dyes due to theirhigh transparency in both pumping and lasing ranges and superioroptical homogeneity. In this paper solid dye samples based onpolymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) doped with different concentrations of1, 3, 5, 7, 8 -pentamethyl-2, 6-diethylpyrromethene-BF$_{2 }$ (PM567)are prepared. The absorption, fluorescence and lasing spectra of thesamples are obtained. Wide absorption and fluorescence bands areobtained and a red shift of the maxima of the lasing emission spectrais observed. With the second-harmonic generation of Q-switched Nd:YAGlaser (532,nm, $sim $20,ns) pumping the samples longitudinally,the slope efficiencies of the samples are obtained. There is anoptimal dye concentration for the highest slope efficiency when thepumping energy is lower than some typical value ($sim $250,mJ), andthe highest slope efficiency 35.6{%} is obtained in the sample witha dye concentration of $2times10^{ - 4}$,mol/L. Pumping the samplesat a rate of 10Hz with a pulse energy as high as 200,mJ (the fluenceis 0.2,J/cm$^{2})$, the output energy drops to one-half of itsinitial value after approximate 15500 pulses and the normalizedphotostability is 5.17,GJ/mol. A kind of solid dye laser which couldhave some applications is built.