Increased laser action in commercial dyes from fluorination regardless of their skeleton

The direct and simple fluorination of representative organic laser dyes with emission covering the entire visible spectrum, from blue to red, including Coumarin 460, Pyrromethene 546, Rhodamine 6G and Perylene Red, enhances laser efficiencies by a factor up to 1.8 with respect to the corresponding non-fluorinated parent dyes. More importantly, fluorination also significantly enhances the photostability of the dyes, even under drastic laser pumping conditions.