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An ordinary bubble can serve as an optofluidics laser. These bubble lasers have been made of dye-doped soap solutions and smectic liquid crystal. In a bubble laser, the bubble itself serves as the optical cavity. Uniquely, bubble lasers exhibit hundreds of regularly spaced resonant frequencies called whispering gallery modes, named for the Whispering Gallery in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. Researchers have found that the emission spectrum of a bubble laser is highly dependent on the bubble's environment; changing ambient air pressure or changes the size of the bubble (the optical resonator), and therefore the wavelengths of laser emission.
A soap bubble's thickness is constantly changing due to freely flowing water inside the bubble. This results in an unstable lasing spectrum. More stable results were achieved when the bubbles were made of smectic liquid crystal, which is made entirely of organic liquid-crystal molecules. These bubbles do not contain water, can be very thin, and can survive almost indefinitely.
In the future, bubble lasers may be used to study thin films and phenomena such as Cavity optomechanics.
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