Tutorial on fiber-based sources for biophotonic applications

Abstract

Abstract. Fiber-based lasers and master oscillator power fiber amplifier configurations are described. These allow spectral versatility coupled with pulse width and pulse repetition rate selection in compact and efficient packages. This is enhanced through the use of nonlinear optical conversion in fibers and fiber-coupled nonlinear crystals, which can be integrated to provide all-fiber pump sources for diverse application. The advantages and disadvantages of sources based upon supercontinuum generation, stimulated Raman conversion, four-wave mixing, parametric generation and difference frequency generation, allowing spectral coverage from the UV to the mid-infrared, are considered.

Special Section Guest Editorial: Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging, Optical Micromechanics, and Beyond

“…The second invited tutorial, also from a lecturer (Prof. Seemantini Nadkarni) at the school, covers speckle-based measurement techniques and their applications for imaging cell micromechanics. These tutorials further build the online JBO resources for high quality teaching material and provide a natural continuation to previous tutorial papers on the foundation of diffuse optics, 2 imaging thick tissues with diffuse optics, 3 molecular imaging, 4 optical micromanipulation, 5 photodynamic therapy, 6 optical coherence tomography, 7 biological imaging with coherent Raman scattering microscopy, 8 in vivo applications of Raman spectroscopy, 9 photoacoustic tomography, 10 and fiber-based sources for biophotonics 11 published in similar special sections from previous schools. These papers all belong to a planned series of tutorial review papers from each biennial school that provide high-level, open-access educational material for the benefit of the scientific community and, in addition, fulfill our own motivation for creating the school in the first place.…”

Special Section Guest Editorial: Special Section on Selected Topics in Biophotonics: Optogenetics and Label-Free Optical Spectroscopy

“…This paper from a lecturer at the school is tutorial in character and provides an excellent background to the field of in-vivo Raman spectroscopy while also pointing to applications and future challenges. This invited tutorial provides a natural continuation to previous tutorial papers on the foundation of diffuse optics, 2 imaging thick tissues with diffuse optics, 3 molecular imaging, 4 optical micromanipulation, 5 photodynamic therapy, 6 optical coherence tomography, 7 biological imaging with coherent Raman scattering microscopy, 8 photoacoustic tomography, 9 and fiber-based sources for biophotonics 10 published in similar special sections from previous schools. These papers all belong to a planned series of tutorial review papers from each biennial school that provide high-level, open-access educational material for the benefit of the scientific community and, in addition, fulfill our own motivation for creating the school in the first place.…”

Ultrafast Fiber Lasers: An Expanding Versatile Toolbox

“…It is well known that, among solid-state ultrafast lasers, mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser may be the most successful one largely because the associated huge gain bandwidth permits broadly tuning (>300 nm) the center wavelength of the emitted pulses. Ultrashort pulses with the center wavelength tunable are desired in many microscopy and spectroscopy applications (Lefort, 2017;Taylor, 2016;. Unfortunately, limited by the available gain bandwidth, ultrafast fiber lasers exhibit much narrower tuning range (Ma et al, 2019;Nyushkov et al, 2019).…”