Highly Sensitive Signal Detection In Stimulated Parametric Emission Microscopy Based On Two-beam Interferometry

摘要

We present a simple and highly sensitive optical detection method based on two-beam interferometry for application to coherent nonlinear optical microscopy (CNOM). The theoretical sensitivity of this method is higher than that of conventional spectral interferometry (SI). We experimentally applied this technique to stimulated parametric emission (SPE) microscopy and achieved a high sensitivity that is only 4 or 5 dB lower than that of a theoretical shot noise limit. In order to validate the practical applicability of this technique, we demonstrated a noise reduction experiment in the observation of a plant cell with an SPE microscope.