Multi-dimensional Imaging

Chapter 15High-Speed 3D Spectral Imaging with Stimulated Raman Scattering

Yasuyuki Ozeki¹ and Kazuyoshi Itoh^1,2

¹Graduate School of Engineering, Department of Material & Life Science, Osaka University, Japan

²Science Technology Entrepreneurship Laboratory (e-square), Osaka University, Japan

15.1 Introduction

Ultrafast laser pulses with durations from femtoseconds to picoseconds can have high peak intensities while the average power is kept low. When such pulses are tightly focused on materials, various types of nonlinear-optical effects can occur such as harmonic generation, wave mixing, and stimulated scattering. Compared with linear optical effects such as refraction and absorption, nonlinear-optical effects lead to rich light-matter interactions. One of the important applications of such nonlinear optical effects is nonlinear optical microscopy, which exploits nonlinear optical effects for microscopic imaging. Depending on the nonlinear optical effect involved, nonlinear optical microscopy provides various contrast mechanisms. A common advantage of nonlinear optical microscopy is that it has 3D resolution because nonlinear optical interaction is confined to the vicinity of focal volume where the laser intensity is the highest.

Nowadays, biology researchers use two-photon excited fluorescence (TPEF) microscopy, which was developed in 1990 [1]. In TPEF microscopy, samples are labeled with fluorescent molecules and proteins and then irradiated by focused femtosecond pulses ...