Widefield CARS microscopy

We have developed a wide field CARS microscope where an extended area within the sample plane is simultaneously exposed to Pump and Stokes beam pulses of 3ns length at repetition rates of up to 30Hz. Compared to the conventional beam-scanning approach this has the following advantages:

• Snapshots of rapid processes can be taken.
• The generated anti-Stokes signal strength scales with the second power of the interaction length of the excitation beams. The ability to excite large sample volumes simultaneously thus leads to comparably strong signals.
• The small bandwidth of the used nanosecond-pulses ensures high chemical selectivity (5cm^-1)

Contrast enhancement by tailored phase matching

Investigating the single-cell metabolism of lipids

Wide-field CARS imaging at video rate