Shaken Granular Lasers

Abstract

Granular materials have been studied for decades, also driven by industrial and technological applications. These very simple systems, composed by agglomerations of mesoscopic particles, are characterized, in specific regimes, by a large number of metastable states and an extreme sensitivity (e.g., in sound transmission) on the arrangement of grains; they are not substantially affected by thermal phenomena, but can be controlled by mechanical solicitations. Laser emission from shaken granular matter is so far unexplored; here we provide experimental evidence that it can be affected and controlled by the status of motion of the granular, we also find that competitive random lasers can be observed. We hence demonstrate the potentialities of gravity affected moving disordered materials for optical applications, and open the road to a variety of novel interdisciplinary investigations, involving modern statistical mechanics and disordered photonics.