Open Access
17 July 2024 Stable high-peak-power fiber supercontinuum generation for adaptive femtosecond biophotonics
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Abstract

Broad and safe access to ultrafast laser technology has been hindered by the absence of optical fiber-delivered pulses with tunable central wavelength, pulse repetition rate, and pulse width in the picosecond–femtosecond regime. To address this long-standing obstacle, we developed a reliable accessory for femtosecond ytterbium fiber chirped pulse amplifiers, termed a fiber-optic nonlinear wavelength converter (FNWC), as an adaptive optical source for the emergent field of femtosecond biophotonics. This accessory empowers the fixed-wavelength laser to produce fiber-delivered 20 nJ pulses with central wavelength across 950 to 1150 nm, repetition rate across 1 to 10 MHz, and pulse width across 40 to 400 fs, with a long-term stability of >2000 h. As a prototypical label-free application in biology and medicine, we demonstrate the utility of FNWC in real-time intravital imaging synergistically integrated with modern machine learning and large-scale fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy.

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE and CLP under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
Geng Wang, Jindou Shi, Rishyashring R. Iyer, Janet E. Sorrells, and Haohua Tu "Stable high-peak-power fiber supercontinuum generation for adaptive femtosecond biophotonics," Advanced Photonics Nexus 3(4), 046012 (17 July 2024). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.APN.3.4.046012
Received: 20 April 2024; Accepted: 27 June 2024; Published: 17 July 2024
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KEYWORDS
Supercontinuum generation

Biological imaging

Biomedical optics

Femtosecond phenomena

Video

Fiber lasers

Ultrafast phenomena

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