Laser Speckle Contrast Imaging (LSCI) is a wide field of view, non scanning optical technique for observing blood flow. Speckles are produced when coherent light scattered back from biological tissue is diffracted through the limiting aperture of focusing optics. Mobile scatterers cause the speckle pattern to blur; a model can be constructed by inversely relating the degree of blur, termed speckle contrast to the scatterer speed. In tissue, red blood cells are the main source of moving scatterers. Therefore, blood flow acts as a virtual contrast agent, outlining blood vessels. The spatial resolution (~10 μm) and temporal resolution (10 ms to 10 s) of LSCI can be tailored to the application. Restricted by the penetration depth of light, LSCI can only visualize superficial blood flow. Additionally, due to its non scanning nature, LSCI is unable to provide depth resolved images. The simple setup and non-dependence on exogenous contrast agents have made LSCI a popular tool for studying vascular structure and blood flow dynamics. We discuss the theory and practice of LSCI and critically analyze its merit in major areas of application such as retinal imaging, imaging of skin perfusion as well as imaging of neurophysiology.
Auger electron spectroscopy (AES) and x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) measurements have been carried out on the β-SiC(100) surface simultaneously. The AES and XPS results differ significantly in the bonding state of oxygen for both as-grown surfaces and as-etched surfaces. Differences in the same carbon-KLL Auger spectra induced by both electron beams and x rays from the same surface suggest that the electron beam used in AES removed considerable amounts of carbonaceous species in the contaminant layers. Furthermore, comparison of the Si 2p and Si LVV spectra revealed that the SiOx (x<2) species on the surface was also reduced by the electron beam used in AES. Although previous AES results have shown that both as-grown and as-etched surfaces of β-SiC(100) were covered with only submonolayer coverage of oxygen bonded to Si atoms, with no detectable carbonaceous contaminants, this work shows that the real surfaces, however, are covered with several tens of contaminant layers, including SiO, CC, CH, and CO bonds.
In this Letter, we demonstrate 22.7 W mid-infrared (MIR) supercontinuum (SC) generation in all-solid fluorotellurite fibers. All-solid fluorotellurite fibers based on
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modified fluoroaluminate glasses are fabricated by using a rod-in-tube method. By using a 0.6 m long fluorotellurite fiber with a core diameter of 11 µm as the nonlinear medium and a high-power 1.93–2.5 µm SC fiber laser as the pump source, we obtain 22.7 W SC generation from 0.93 to 3.95 µm in the fiber for a pump power of 39.7 W. The 10 dB bandwidth is about 1633 nm, and the corresponding spectral range is from 1890 to 3523 nm. The optical-to-optical conversion efficiency is about 57.2%. Our results show that all-solid fluorotellurite fibers are promising nonlinear media for constructing high-power MIR SC light sources.
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