Intrinsic Chiral Fiber Lasers Enabled by Chiral Supramolecular Glasses

Abstract

Chiral fiber lasers, owing to their unique circularly polarized laser output, are crucial in frontier fields such as spin photonics, quantum information processing, and high-sensitivity chiral sensing. Current fabrication methods, relying on mechanical twisting or complex multicore structures, are limited by poor torsional strain tolerance, structural instability, and difficulties in achieving precise intercore coupling. To address these bottlenecks, we propose and demonstrate an innovative fabrication strategy using chiral supramolecular glasses (SGs) as the optical fiber core material. This approach leverages the intrinsic chirality of SGs to impart macroscopic chirality to the fiber. By integrating high-performance gain dyes, we successfully construct and characterize a chiral fiber laser. The readily designable chiral motifs of SGs and their near-room-temperature glass transition temperature simplify fabrication and enhance structural controllability. The resulting chiral fiber laser stably emits narrow-line width circularly polarized laser output with an asymmetry value (glum) of approximately 0.31. This work establishes chiral SG-based systems as a high-performance, highly designable class of chiral laser gain media, paving a new technological path for next-generation functionalized fiber lasers.