New nonlinear endoscopy method

AQO researchers Matthijs Velsink and Pepijn Pinkse together with Lyuba Amitonova from ARCNL & VU published a new method for creating an ultrashort temporal focus at a particular position at the output facet of a multimode optical fiber. The position of the ultrashort focus is only determined by the temporal shape of the input pulse. Changing that pulse shape allows scanning the focus at the output, e.g. to probe a scene by raster scanning the ultrashort pulse. The researchers demonstrated raster scanning along a square grid, but in principle every shape is possible, e.g. the following smiley, which is imaged via nonlinear medium to only show the position of the ultrashort pulses. The result is published in the journal Optics Express.