Background-free coherent anti-stokes Raman spectroscopy and microscopy by dual-soliton pulse generation

Abstract

We propose an all-fiber-generated dual-soliton pulses based scheme for the background-free detection of coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy under the spectral focusing mechanism. Due to the strong birefringence and high nonlinearity of a polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber (PM-PCF), two redshifted soliton pulses can be simultaneously generated relying on high-order dispersion and nonlinear effects along two eigenpolarization axes in the anomalous dispersion regime, while allowing feasible tunability of the frequency distance and temporal interval between them. This proposed scheme, termed as DS-CARS, exploits a unique combination of slight frequency-shift and advisable temporal walk-off of this two soliton pulses to achieve robust and efficient suppression of nonresonant background with compact all-fiber coherent excitation source. Capability of the DS-CARS is experimentally demonstrated by the background-free CARS spectroscopy and unambiguous CARS microscopy of polymer beads in the fingerprint region.

arXiv comment7 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• High-Speed Coherent Raman Fingerprint Imaging of Biological Tissues
• Interferometric differentiation between resonant Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering and nonresonant four-wave-mixing processes
• Supercontinuum optimization for dual-soliton based light sources using genetic algorithms in a Grid platform

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Phase-controlled dual-comb coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopic imaging