Novel cone lasing emission in a non-uniform one-dimensional photonic crystal

Novel cone lasing emission is observed from a photonic crystal (PC) with graded layers, which is fabricated by two-beam holographic interference in dichromated gelatin. The cone lasing is composed of one lasing spot and one concentric lasing ring. The good agreement between the experimental results and a numerical simulation performed using the transfer matrix method demonstrates that this lasing ring is induced by the coupling between the band edge and minigap, which is represented as some oscillations near the band edge in the passband of the reflection spectrum. The cone lasing may be useful for multi-wavelength fluorescence detection since the dual-colour directional enhanced fluorescence can be achieved without the mutual interference of lasing modes. Moreover, this readily observable cone lasing provides a direct visualization of the dispersion relation of non-uniform PCs.