RESUMO
Label-free and multiphoton micro-endoscopy can transform clinical histopathology by providing an in situ tool for diagnostic imaging and surgical treatment in diseases such as cancer. Key to a multiphoton imaging-based micro-endoscopic device is the optical fiber, for distortion-free and efficient delivery of ultra-short laser pulses to the sample and effective signal collection. In this work, we study a new hollow-core (air-filled) double-clad anti-resonant fiber (DC-ARF) as a high-performance candidate for multiphoton micro-endoscopy. We compare the fiber characteristics of the DC-ARF with a single-clad anti-resonant fiber (SC-ARF) and a solid core fiber (SCF). In this work, while the DC-ARF and the SC-ARF enable low-loss (<0.2 dBm-1), close to dispersion-free excitation pulse delivery (<10% pulse width increase at 900 nm per 1 m fiber) without any induced non-linearities, the SCF resulted in spectral broadening and pulse-stretching (>2000% of pulse width increase at 900 nm per 1 m fiber). An ideal optical fiber endoscope needs to be several meters long and should enable both excitation and collection through the fiber. Therefore, we performed multiphoton imaging on endoscopy-compatible 1 m and 3 m lengths of fiber in the back-scattered geometry, wherein the signals were collected either directly (non-descanned detection) or through the fiber (descanned detection). Second harmonic images were collected from barium titanate crystals as well as from biological samples (mouse tail tendon). In non-descanned detection conditions, the ARFs outperformed the SCF by up to 10 times in terms of signal-to-noise ratio of images. Significantly, only the DC-ARF, due to its high numerical aperture (NA) of 0.45 and wide-collection bandwidth (>1 µm), could provide images in the de-scanned detection configuration desirable for endoscopy. Thus, our systematic characterization and comparison of different optical fibers under different image collection configurations, confirms and establishes the utility of DC-ARFs for high-performing label-free multiphoton imaging-based micro-endoscopy.
RESUMO
Metrological atomic force microscopy measurements are performed on the silica glass interfaces of photonic band-gap fibers and hollow capillaries. The freezing of attenuated out-of-equilibrium capillary waves during the drawing process is shown to result in a reduced surface roughness. The roughness attenuation with respect to the expected thermodynamical limit is determined to vary with the drawing stress following a power law. A striking anisotropic character of the height correlation is observed: glass surfaces thus retain a structural record of the direction of the flow to which the liquid was submitted.