Experiments on random lasers: a novel method for super-resolution spectroscopy

In this work we report on experimental insights about random laser emission and propose a novel spectroscopy technique that employs random lasers as the ideal source of illumination. The main part of this work is the demonstration of the first experimental spectral super-resolved reconstruction of a simple transmission function. We show that this can be done using a random laser as light source, taking advantage of its intrinsic stochastic emission properties. In particular, by operating a random laser in its chaotic regime, we obtain an emission spectrum characterized by sharp random spikes, sparsely distributed over the emission bandwidth and which are uncorrelated from shot to shot. These sparse collections of narrow spikes can be used to probe the spectral response of a sample and to reconstruct a high-resolution response function using a ‘bad’, low resolution, spectrometer.