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We experimentally demonstrate a passively mode-locked thulium doped fiber laser using a bismuth telluride deposited multimode interference (MMI) fiber at a wavelength of 1958 nm. Our MMI based saturable absorber was fabricated by fusion splicing with single mode fiber and null core fiber. The center wavelength and insertion loss of MMI fiber were measured to be ~ 1958 nm and 3.4 dB. We observed a passively mode locked thulium doped fiber laser operating at a wavelength of 1958 nm. The temporal pulse width of output pulses is 4.2 ps with repetition rate of 22.7 MHz.

Most of the two-photon fluorescence microscopes are based on femtosecond Ti:Sapphire laser sources near the 800 nm wavelength. Here, we introduce a new confocal two-photon microscope system using a mode-locked Yb3+-doped fiber laser. The mode-locked fiber laser produces 13 ps pulses with large positive chirping at a repetition rate of 36 MHz with an average power of 80 mW. By using an external grating pair pulse compressor, the pulse width and the frequency chirping of the laser output are controlled for optimum two-photon excitation. For a given objective lens, the optimum condition was obtained by monitoring the two-photon-induced-photocurrent in a GaAsP photodiode at the sample position. The performance of this pulse width optimized two-photon microscope system was demonstrated by imaging Vybrant DiI-stained dorsal root ganglion cells in 2 and 3 dimensions. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America

Two-photon microscopy is a very attractive tool for the study of the three-dimensional (3D) and dynamic processes in cells and tissues. One of the feasible constructions of two-photon microscopy is the combination a confocal laser scanning microscope and a mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser. Even though this approach is the simplest and fastest implementation, this system is highly cost-intensive and considerably difficult in modification. Many researcher therefore decide to build a more cost-effective and flexible system with a self-developed software for operation and data acquisition. We present a custom-built two-photon microscope based on a mode-locked Yb3+ doped fiber laser and demonstrate two-photon fluorescence imaging of biological specimens. The mode-locked fiber laser at 1060 nm delivers 320 fs laser pulses at a frequency of 36 MHz up to average power of 80 mW. The excitation at 1060 nm can be more suitable in thick, turbid samples for 3D image construction as well as cell viability. The system can simply accomplish confocal and two-photon mode by an additional optical coupler that allows conventional laser source to transfer to the scanning head. The normal frame rate is 1 frames/s for 400 x 400 pixel images. The measured full width at half maximum resolutions were about 0.44 μm laterally and 1.34 μm axially. A multi-color stained convallaria, rat basophilic leukemia cells and a rat brain tissue were observed by two-photon fluorescence imaging in our system.

We constructed a passively mode-locked Er-doped fiber laser (PML-EDFL). It generates ~ 1.3 ps pulses at a repetition rate of 12 MHz with an average output power of 0.7 mW. These pulses are amplified in a short Er-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) which is composed of low nonlinearity EDF. The average power of amplified pulse is about 15 mW. And its pulse width is about 880 fs. An all-fiber supercontinuum (SC) is generated by putting the amplified fiber laser pulse at the wavelength of 1. 56 mm into the highly nonlinear dispersion shifted fiber (HN-DSF) whose zero dispersion wavelength is 1.537 mm and nonlinear coefficient is about 10.5/W/km at the input wavelength. The polarization state of the generated SC spectra is well defined such that it can be properly controlled by the polarization controller. By using a delayed pulsed method, we report an experimental study of the coherence of SC spectra generated through a HN-DSF. In this paper, the strong dependence of the spectral coherence on the HN-DSF length is observed experimentally. And optimal conditions for obtaining wide SC with high coherence are investigated in detail. We believed that our proposed all-fiber laser based SC source with high coherence has many important applications in recently developed frequencydomain measurement techniques such as optical coherence tomography (OCT), optical frequency domain imaging (OFDI), optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) and their instrumentation.

We present the development and implementation of a spatially and spectrally resolved multipoint fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) system utilizing multiple end-capped optical fibers and an inexpensive laser source. Specially prepared end-capped optical fibers placed in an image plane were used to both collect fluorescence signals from the sample and to deliver signals to the detectors. The placement of independently selected optical fibers on the image plane was done by monitoring the end-capped fiber tips at the focus using a CCD, and fluorescence from specific positions of a sample were collected by an end-capped fiber, which could accurately represent light intensities or spectral data without incurring any disturbance. A fast multipoint spectroscopy system with a time resolution of ∼1.5 ms was then implemented using a prism and an electron multiplying charge coupled device with a pixel binning for the region of interest. The accuracy of our proposed system was subsequently confirmed by experimental results, based on an FCS analysis of microspheres in distilled water. We expect that the proposed multipoint site-specific fluorescence measurement system can be used as an inexpensive fluorescence measurement tool to study many intracellular and molecular dynamics in cell biology.