Multiphoton excitation imaging via an actively mode-locked tunable fiber-cavity SOA laser around 800 nm

Seung Won Jun; Hansol Jang; Jaeheung Kim; Chang-Seok Kim

doi:10.1364/BOE.447010

Multiphoton excitation imaging via an actively mode-locked tunable fiber-cavity SOA laser around 800 nm

Biomed Opt Express. 2022 Jan 3;13(2):525-538. doi: 10.1364/BOE.447010. eCollection 2022 Feb 1.

Authors

Seung Won Jun^{1

2}, Hansol Jang^{3

2}, Jaeheung Kim³, Chang-Seok Kim³

Affiliations

¹ Ground Technology Research Institute, Agency for Defense Development, Daejeon 34186, Republic of Korea.
² These authors contributed equally to this work.
³ Department of Cogno-Mechatronics Engineering, Pusan National University, 2 Busandaehak-ro 63 beon-gil, Busan, 46241, Republic of Korea.

Abstract

In this study, an active mode-locked tunable pulsed laser (AML-TPL) is proposed to excite picosecond pulsed light with a rapid wavelength tunability of approximately 800 nm for multiphoton microscopy. The AML-TPL is schematically based on a fiber-cavity semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) configuration to implement a robust and align-free pulsed light source with a duration of 1.6 ps, a repetition rate of 27.9271 MHz, and average output power of over 600 mW. A custom-built multiphoton imaging system was also built to demonstrate the imaging performance of the proposed AML-TPL by comparing with the commercial Ti:Sapphire femtosecond laser. Two-photon excited fluorescence images were successfully acquired using a human breast cancer cell line (MDA-MB-231) stained with acridine orange.