Whispering gallery mode laser based on antitumor drug-dye complex gain medium.

Optofluidic lasers have emerged as a new research field over the past few years. Most frequently they use conventional dye molecules as the gain medium. In this Letter, we demonstrate a laser emission produced by the coupling of the evanescent whispering gallery modes that resonate in a cylindrical microresonator to a newly developed gain medium. This medium is formed by attachment of a 7-nitrobenzo [c] [1,2,5]-oxadiazol-4-yl fluorescent tag to tamoxifen, the most widely used drug in the treatment of breast cancer. The antitumor character of the gain medium paves the way to novel biophotonic applications. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America