Our Clusterpartner WinWinTec International Group and TRUMPF Active Fiber Systems have won a bidding competition from a southern Chinese research group to develop a dual-wavelength picosecond fiber laser for Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) microscopy.
With the SRS laser, they address a tunability range from 1000 to 3300 cm-1 with a spectral bandwidth of <10cm-1 (output 1) and <15cm-1 (output 2), respectively. For the users, which are researchers from the Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun-Yat-Sen University, and the Chemistry and Chemical Engineering Guangdong Laboratory, they will integrate it into a general-purpose SRS microscope to achieve rapid chemical mapping in biological materials and pharmaceuticals. Furthermore, the SRS laser will be used for developing SRS tags for medical diagnosis.
Fig. 1: Image of the SRS laser (Copyright WinWinTec International Group, 2023)
Their SRS lasers involve third-order nonlinear optical processes where three electromagnetic waves interact with the sample volume to generate a characteristic optical signal. Upon coincidence of the difference frequency of a pair of such waves corresponding to the frequency of a Raman resonance, the signal is greatly enhanced. These techniques are typically employed to image bio-molecules in living or fixed cells or tissues. They offer the great advantage to not require any sort of labeling or staining. Additionally, spectral information is obtained using broadband light sources. The signal-to-noise ratio of these applications benefits greatly from the application of pulsed lasers at high repetition rates.
Fig. 2: Spectra output of the wavelength 1 & 2 (Copyright Thomas Gottschall, PhD thesis 2017)
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