Louis Desbiens, Vincent Roy, Michel Jacob, Yves Taillon
Abstract
Advances in the research fields of biological, biophysical and biochemistry rely on the development of novel, flexible, powerful and reliable laser sources in the visible - NIR part of the spectrum. Optical excitation in the 750-800 nm region, with flexible pulsed formats, can be advantageous in applications such as confocal fluorescence microscopy, STED, FLIM microscopy, photoluminescence spectroscopy, laser photocoagulation and time-resolved spectroscopy. Finely tailored pulse formatting can indeed provide significant enhancement in many of those techniques by optimizing the temporal distribution of the optical excitation with respect to the specific characteristics of the fluorophore of interest such as its excited-state lifetime for example. With those considerations we have developed a fiber laser source that combines a 1550 nm pulse-shaped MOPA system, offering coarse temporal control resolution (1 ns), with a high frequency AWG module operating at close to 8 GHz, that drives an intensity modulator downstream of the directly modulated semiconductor seed diode of the MOPA system.
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