Infrared chemical imaging through nondegenerate two-photon absorption in silicon-based cameras

Abstract

Chemical imaging based on mid-infrared (MIR) spectroscopic contrast is an important technique with a myriad of applications, including biomedical imaging and environmental monitoring. Current MIR cameras, however, lack in performance and are much less affordable compared to mature Si-based devices, which operate in the visible and near-infrared. Here we demonstrate fast MIR chemical imaging through non-degenerate two-photon absorption (NTA) in a standard Si-based charge-coupled device (CCD). We show that wide-field MIR images can be obtained at 100 ms exposure times using picosecond pulse energies of only a few fJ per pixel through NTA directly on the CCD chip. Because this on-chip approach does not rely on phase-matching, it is alignment-free and does not necessitate complex post-processing of the images. We emphasize the utility of this technique through chemically selective MIR imaging of polymers and biological samples, including MIR videos of moving targets, physical processes and live nematodes.

References in corpus (2)

• Hyperspectral Infrared Microscopy With Visible Light
• Tunable Up-Conversion Photon Detector

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Wide-field mid-infrared single-photon upconversion imaging
• Mid-infrared photon counting and resolving via efficient frequency upconversion
• Mid-Infrared Single-Photon Edge Enhanced Imaging based on Nonlinear Vortex Filtering
• High-speed 2D and 3D mid-IR imaging with an InGaAs camera
• Highly sensitive detection for infrared photons by non-degenerate two-photon absorption under mid-infrared pumping
• Mid-infrared single-pixel imaging via two-photon optical encoding
• Mid-infrared nonlinear pinhole imaging
• Single-Photon Infrared Imaging with a Silicon Camera Based on Long-Wavelength-Pumping Two-Photon Absorption
• Mid-infrared temporal ghost imaging via two-photon structured encoding