High-speed stimulated Brillouin scattering spectroscopy at 780 nm

Abstract

We demonstrate a high-speed stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) spectroscopy system that is able to acquire stimulated Brillouin gain point-spectra in water samples and Intralipid tissue phantoms over 2 GHz within 10 ms and 100 ms, respectively, showing a 10-100 fold increase in acquisition rates over current frequency-domain SBS spectrometers. This improvement was accomplished by integrating an ultra-narrowband hot rubidium-85 vapor notch filter in a simplified frequency-domain SBS spectrometer comprising nearly counter-propagating continuous-wave pump-probe light at 780 nm and conventional single-modulation lock-in detection. The optical notch filter significantly suppressed stray pump light, enabling detection of stimulated Brillouin gain spectra with substantially improved acquisition times at adequate signal-to-noise ratios (∼25 dB in water samples and ∼15 dB in tissue phantoms). These results represent an important step towards the use of SBS spectroscopy for high-speed measurements of Brillouin gain resonances in scattering and non-scattering samples.