Fiber Four-Wave Mixing Source for Coherent Anti-Stokes Raman Scattering Microscopy

Abstract

We present a fiber-format picosecond light source for coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy. Pulses from an Yb-doped fiber amplifier are frequency-converted by four-wave mixing in normal dispersion photonic crystal fiber to produce a synchronized two-color picosecond pulse train. We show that seeding the four-wave mixing process overcomes the deleterious effects of group-velocity mismatch and allows efficient conversion into narrow frequency bands. The source generates more than 160 mW of nearly-transform-limited pulses tunable from 775 to 815 nm. High-quality coherent Raman images of animal tissues and cells acquired with this source are presented.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog