Breakthrough made in development of laser textiles

MIT Technology Review : Although lasers are common in everyday technology, making non-solid-state lasers is difficult. Doping optical fibers has had some success, but it is of limited use because of the fibers’ size and lack of flexibility. Now Andrea Composeo of the National Nanotechnology Laboratory at the Institute of Nanoscience in Lecce, Italy, and his colleagues have developed a technique to create laser textiles. They introduced laser dyes—organic molecules that absorb specific frequencies of light and reemit higher frequencies—into the standard electrospinning process. They created fibers, ranging in diameters of several hundred nanometers to a few microns, that lase when exposed to light and can even pass the light from fiber to fiber. Composeo says the low-cost process can be adjusted to lase for a wide range of frequencies, so the fibers can be incorporated into different textiles for a variety of uses.