Three-dimensional patterning in transparent materials with spatiotemporally focused femtosecond laser pulses

Abstract

According to specific configurations, three-dimensional (3D) patterning involves both 3D bioimaging and laser micromachining. Recent advances in bioimaging have witnessed strong interests in the exploration of novel microscopy methods capable of dynamic imaging of living organisms with high resolution, and large field of view (FOV). For most, applications of bioimaging should be limited by the tradeoff between the speed, resolution, and FOV in common techniques, e.g., confocal laser scanning microscopy and two-photon microscopy. However, a recently proposed temporal focusing (TF) technique, based on spatio/temporal shaping of femtosecond laser pulses, enables depth-resolved bioimaging in a wide-field illumination. This lecture firstly provides a glimpse into the state-of-the-art progress of temporal focusing for bioimaging applications. Then we reveal a bizarre point spread function (PSF) of the temporal focusing system, both experimentally and theoretically. It can be expected that this newly emerged technique will exhibited new advances in not only 3D nonlinear bioimaging but also femtosecond laser micromachining in the future.