Paper
23 February 2018 Optimizing Ti:Sapphire laser for quantitative biomedical imaging
Jeemol James, Hanna Thomsen, Dag Hanstorp, Felipe Ademir Alemán Hérnandez, Sebastian Rothe, Jonas Enger, Marica B. Ericson
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
Ti:Sapphire lasers are powerful tools in the field of scientific research and industry for a wide range of applications such as spectroscopic studies and microscopic imaging where tunable near-infrared light is required. To push the limits of the applicability of Ti:Sapphire lasers, fundamental understanding of the construction and operation is required. This paper presents two projects, (i) dealing with the building and characterization of custom built tunable narrow linewidth Ti:Sapphire laser for fundamental spectroscopy studies; and the second project (ii) the implementation of a fs-pulsed commercial Ti:Sapphire laser in an experimental multiphoton microscopy platform.

For the narrow linewidth laser, a gold-plated diffraction grating with a Littrow geometry was implemented for highresolution wavelength selection. We demonstrate that the laser is tunable between 700 to 950 nm, operating in a pulsed mode with a repetition rate of 1 kHz and maximum average output power around 350 mW. The output linewidth was reduced from 6 GHz to 1.5 GHz by inserting an additional 6 mm thick etalon. The bandwidth was measured by means of a scanning Fabry Perot interferometer.

Future work will focus on using a fs-pulsed commercial Ti:Sapphire laser (Tsunami, Spectra physics), operating at 80 MHz and maximum average output power around 1 W, for implementation in an experimental multiphoton microscopy set up dedicated for biomedical applications. Special focus will be on controlling pulse duration and dispersion in the optical components and biological tissue using pulse compression. Furthermore, time correlated analysis of the biological samples will be performed with the help of time correlated single photon counting module (SPCM, Becker&Hickl) which will give a novel dimension in quantitative biomedical imaging.
© (2018) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Jeemol James, Hanna Thomsen, Dag Hanstorp, Felipe Ademir Alemán Hérnandez, Sebastian Rothe, Jonas Enger, and Marica B. Ericson "Optimizing Ti:Sapphire laser for quantitative biomedical imaging ", Proc. SPIE 10498, Multiphoton Microscopy in the Biomedical Sciences XVIII, 1049824 (23 February 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2286732
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KEYWORDS
Sapphire lasers

Biomedical optics

Multiphoton microscopy

Spectroscopy

Imaging spectroscopy

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