Abstract

Nonlinear microscopy requires ultrashort pulses with highest peak intensities for efficient signal generation. Such spectrally broad excitation pulses are however difficult to tame and require a precise phase management in order to compensate for inevitable temporal distortions in the microscope setup. To achieve this, the femtosecond pulses can be characterized and shaped in situ in the microscope with a simplified SPIDER scheme. In this shaper-assisted collinear (SAC-) SPIDER scheme, a femtosecond pulse shaper eliminates the need of a complicated interferometer setup and performs all characterization, compression and tailoring of complex pulses at the same time.

© 2007 IEEE