Photon statistics of laserlike emission from polymeric scattering gain media.

The coherent properties of the temporally and spectrally narrowed emission of laser-induced fluorescence of organic dyes hosted inside artificial scattering matrices (random lasers) were investigated. The excitation source was a frequency-doubled 200-fs pulsed laser emitting at 400 nm. Spectral and temporal features were simultaneously recorded with a spectrograph and a streak camera operating in photon-counting mode. Photon-number distributions were thus created. The temporal coherence of the laserlike emission above and below the excitation energy threshold was investigated from the photon-number distribution that was obtained.