Organic single crystal lasers: a materials view

Materials design has become a vigorous aspect for organic solid-state lasing, which often lacks a fundamental understanding of structure-property relationships. The development of such an understanding is undertaken in this progress report, which systematically explores the now-available libraries of organic single crystals exhibiting light amplification under optical pumping. By doing so, intra- and intermolecular contributions are disentangled for the non-/occurrence, type, threshold, wavelength, and polarization of the light amplification processes, opening the path to targeted materials design. Organic single-crystal lasers have attracted much interest in materials science during the last years. The now-available materials libraries are systematically explored to disentangle intra- and intermolecular contributions for the non-/occurrence, type, threshold, wavelength, and polarization of the light amplification processes, opening the path to targeted materials design.