High-performance fiber parametric oscillator for coherent Raman microscopy

A compact, alignment-free, and inexpensive fiber source for coherent Raman spectroscopy would benefit the field considerably. We present a fiber optical parametric oscillator offering the best performance from a fiber-source to date. Pumping the oscillator with amplified pulses from a 1 μm fiber laser, we achieve widely spaced, narrowband pulses suitable for coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy. The nearly transform limited, 2 ps signal pulses are generated through the use of normal dispersion four wave mixing in photonic crystal fiber, and can be tuned from 779-808 nm, limited by the tuning range of the seed laser. The average signal power can reach 180 mW (pulse energies up to 4 nJ). The long-wavelength idler field is resonant in the oscillator, and the use of a narrow bandpass filter in the feedback loop is critical for stable operation, as seen in both simulation and experiment. Due to the self-consistent nature of the oscillator, this source provides lower relative intensity noise on its output pulses than parametric amplifiers based on the same frequency conversion process. We present high quality images of mouse tissues taken with this source that exhibit an outstanding signal to noise ratio at top imaging speeds.