Feasibility demonstration of supercontinuum fiber laser-based coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering microscopy

Coherent anti- Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) microscopy enables the analysis of the chemical composition and distribution within living cells, biomolecules, or living organisms in a label-free manner. Compared with the traditional spontaneous Raman imaging technology, its advantages of high imaging sensitivity and resolution, fast imaging speed and strong signal intensity make it more popular in multiple disciplines. The available CARS microscopes are most adopted advanced crystal solid-state lasers, which are expensive, bulky, and sensitive to the environmental changes. Supercontinuum fiber lasers with a wide spectral tuning range are increasingly used in biomedical applications due to their low cost, small size, and low environmental impact. Here, we homebuilt a CARS microscope based on a supercontinuum fiber laser, a specially tailored laser with a dual-channel time-synchronous outputs. The influence factors were investigated including the objective numerical aperture, laser power, and sample concentration, etc. The feasibility of CARS microscope was then verified by imaging the polystyrene microspheres (PS) and polymethyl methacrylate microspheres (PMMA). Finally, we imaged the lipid droplet distribution of EC109 cell, which revealed the application potential of the supercontinuum fiber laser-based CARS microscope in biomedical applications.