Control and Characterization of ultrafast laser pulse for multiphoton microscopy
The heart of the all our optical techniques lies in the precise manipulation of phases and amplitudes of different frequency components inside a single broadband laser beam. We use a pulse shaper with a LC-SLM (liquid crystal spatial light modulator) to control a broadband laser pulse (bandwidth ~ 120nm). We have developed single beam SPIDER (spectral phase interferometry for direct electric field reconstruction) techniques to characterize the spectral phase of the laser pulse for multiphoton microscopy applications. These methods can extract the phase structure of the laser pulse at the sample position of a microscope without a reference beam.
