Designing all-CArbon-based colour tunable Random Lasers for speckle free Imaging applicaTiOns (CARLITO)

The practical application of conventional lasers is often hampered by inherent difficulties related to their bulky, expensive and highly coherent nature. Some of these issues can be overcome by so-called Random Lasers (RL), devices in which laser emission stems from the random walk of photons in a disordered medium. However, achieving efficient, tunable, and stable RL remains difficult to date. A large variety of nanostructured metals and semiconductors, organic dyes and quantum dots (QDs) were proposed as passive or active scatterers to fabricate RLs. However, organic dyes usually suffer from rapid photo-bleaching, while semiconductor QDs are affected by fluorescence blinking and their toxicity can be a serious pitfall in biomedical RL applications.

CARLITO proposes the use of carbon nanostructured materials (CNMs) to design an entirely new class of RLs for a wide range of photonic applications, where a stable and low-threshold RL is obtained by the combined use of different CNMs as active and passive light scatterers. The ambitious goal of CARLITO is designing the first all-carbon-based RL (ACRL), capable to yield high-quality RL from hybrid CNMs, by taking advantage of the peculiar electronic properties of different zero-, one- and two-dimensional nanocarbons. ACRLs will be a new family of low-cost, non-toxic and fully biocompatible RL devices, which can be easily tuned to emit photons within the entire visible spectral region. Achieving these targets will advance RLs well beyond the current state-of-the-art, favouring their transition into real-world technology, such as in live cell microscopy, speckle free imaging and sensing. In particular, the application of ACRLs in speckle free imaging will be directly tested within the scope of CARLITO.