Polarization switch of four-wave mixing in a lawtunable fiber optical parametric oscillator

Widely tunable fiber optical parametric oscillator synchronized with a Ti:sapphire laser for stimulated Raman scattering microscopy

Stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy is a powerful vibrational imaging technique with high chemical specificity. However, the insufficient tuning range or speed of light sources limits the spectral range of SRS imaging and, hence, the ability to identify molecular species. Here, we present a widely tunable fiber optical parametric oscillator with a tuning range of 1470 cm-1, which can be synchronized with a Ti:sapphire laser. By using the synchronized light sources, we develop an SRS imaging system that covers the fingerprint and C-H stretching regions, without balanced detection. We validate its broadband imaging capability by visualizing a mixed polymer sample in multiple vibrational modes. We also demonstrate SRS imaging of HeLa cells, showing the applicability of our SRS microscope to biological samples.

Numerical investigation of the energy limit in a picosecond fiber optic parametric oscillator

Numerical simulation of a fiber optic parametric oscillator to produce picosecond narrowband pulses for coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy has been performed by an open source Python-based library using an extremely wide range of parameters, such as the pump pulse duration, parametric frequency shift, spectral bandwidth of the pump, and the parametric pulses. It required an extremely large calculation window, both in time and spectral domains. We managed to speed up the simulation 50 times using a graphic processor unit that allowed us to define the areas of stability for different lengths of standard passive (5-100 m) and photonic crystal (23-100 cm) fibers used in the external linear oscillator cavity. It was shown that highly chirped dissipative solitons at a wavelength about 800 nm can be generated with energy up to 55 nJ, which is limited by the pump depletion and self-phase modulation effects.

Generation of broadband parabolic pulses based on a pre-chirper free, core-pumped nonlinear fiber amplifier for coherent anti-Stokes Raman imaging

We report the generation of parabolic pulses with broadband spectrum from a core-pumped Yb-doped fiber amplifier seeded by a dispersion managed fiber oscillator. The net cavity dispersion of Yb-doped oscillator was continuously changed from 0.074 to -0.170 ps², which enabled us to achieve dissipative soliton, stretched pulse and soliton mode-locking operations. Spectral evolution processes in the core-pumped nonlinear fiber amplifier seeded by various input solitons were investigated experimentally and theoretically. Our finding indicates that cavity dispersion of oscillator can be used to engineer the input pulse parameter for amplifier, thus forming a pre-chirper free fiber amplification structure. In the experiment, we obtained 410-mW parabolic pulses with spectral bandwidth up to 56 nm. In combination with a passively synchronized frequency-doubled Er-doped fiber laser, we have demonstrated coherent anti-Stokes Raman imaging. The compact dual-color fiber laser source may facilitate practical applications of nonlinear biomedical imaging beyond the laboratory environment.

Fiber-based optical parametric oscillator with flexible repetition rates by rational harmonic pumping

We demonstrated a fiber-based synchronously pumped optical parametric oscillator (SPOPO) with flexible repetition rates while retaining the cavity length. In contrast to conventional free-space SPOPO, the repetition rate of output signal pulses was solely determined by the repetition rate of the pump source in harmonic, fractional and rational operations. The relevant mechanism relies on synchronous pumping and intrinsic losses in our fiber resonator. The novel scheme enabled us to flexibly tune the repetition rate from 0.5 to 6.0 MHz without altering the resonator configuration. The resulting pulse properties were systematically analyzed at various operation conditions, and particularly showed that a wavelength tuning range of 157 nm was obtained. Such rational harmonic resonance implemented in our SPOPO provides not only a simple yet effective way to tune the repetition rate, but also a feasible approach to narrow down the spectral bandwidth. The presented SPOPO could be useful in nonlinear biomedical imaging by offering a convenient approach to optimize the pulse repetition rate for different biomedical samples with minimum photodamage.

Chirped-pulse optical parametric oscillators

We demonstrated that by introducing an extra optical material with a high nonlinear refractive index into a conventional optical parametric oscillator (OPO) cavity and managing the intra-cavity dispersion, a chirped-pulse OPO (CPOPO) can be constructed, generating optical pulses with an instantaneous bandwidth much wider than the pump bandwidth. Experimentally, from a CPOPO pumped by a Yb-fiber laser system centered at 1058 nm with a pulse duration of 230 fs and a -20  dB bandwidth of 8.7 THz, we obtained a signal wave with a -20  dB bandwidth of 28.4 THz and an idler wave covering 2900-3960 nm with a -20  dB bandwidth of 27.7 THz.

Low-repetition-rate all-fiber integrated optical parametric oscillator for coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy

All-fiber optical parametric oscillator (OPO), offering advantages like robustness, compactness and low lost, has attracted intense interest in coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering spectroscopy. In typical fiber-based OPO configurations, detrimental nonlinear effects due to intense pump field in fiber coupling devices would inevitably degrade the spectral purity and conversion efficiency, especially when the OPO operated at low repetition rates. Here we demonstrated a new OPO design by placing the main amplifier inside the cavity, where the amplified pump pulses were directly coupled into the nonlinear fiber. Consequently, lower threshold, higher output power and narrower spectrum were obtained. In particular, effective suppression of spectral noise was experimentally observed, resulting in threshold reductions of 37.5%, 17.2%, and 5.2% with a comparison to a conventional OPO operating at repetition rates of 1, 2 and 3 MHz, respectively. Furthermore, the generated synchronized two-color laser sources at a low repetition rate were then employed to detect CH vibrational bands in an ethanol sample. This spectral tailored cavity design is expected to greatly promote the spread of compact all-fiber laser source to nonlinear biomedical imaging.