New paper in Frontiers in Physics about a supercontinuum laser programmable spectrum system
A new paper is available at the journal Frontiers in Physics entitled Programmable supercontinuum laser spectrum generator based on a liquid-crystal on silicon spatial light modulator.
In this work we present an optical system to spectrally filter a supercontinuum (SC) laser using liquid-crystal on silicon SLMs. The proposed optical system disperses the input laser and the spectrally separated components are projected onto the LCoS-SLM, where the state of polarization of each wavelength is separately modulated. Finally, recombining the modulated spectral components results in an output laser source where the spectrum can be controlled dynamically from a computer. The system incorporates two branches to independently control the visible (VIS) and the near infrared (NIR) spectral content, thus providing a SC laser source from 450 nm to 1600 nm with programmable spectrum.
We expect this new ability for controlling at will the wide spectra of the SC laser sources can be extremely useful for biological imaging applications.
This work was done with our former Master students Jordi Gomis and Pedro MartÃnez, and with Dr. Aarón Cofre after completing his PhD Thesis.