Single-mode lasing via loss engineering in fiber-taper-coupled polymer bottle microresonators

Due to the lack of mode selection capability, single whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) lasing is a challenge to achieve. In bottle microresonators, the highly nondegenerated WGMs are spatially well-separated along the long-axis direction and provide mode selection according to their axial mode numbers. In this work, we use a loss-engineering approach to suppress the higher-order WGMs and demonstrate single-mode lasing emission in small polymer bottle microresonators. The fiber tapers are not only used to couple pump light into the bottle microresonators to excite the WGMs but also to bring optical losses that are induced from the diameter mismatch between fiber tapers and microresonators. By adjusting the coupling positions, the diameters of fiber tapers, and the coupling angles, single fundamental-mode lasing is efficiently generated with side-mode suppression factors over 15 dB. Our loss-engineering approach is convenient just by moving the fiber taper and may find promising applications in miniature tunable single-mode lasers and sensors. (C) 2017 Chinese Laser Press