Real-time stimulated Raman spectroscopy with a non-collinear optical parametric oscillator

Abstract

Ultrafast detection of microplastic particles is becoming a vital problem, as these particles are found in water sources worldwide. Ideally, a live analysis in flow is desirable to directly monitor the water quality for contaminations. Therefore, coherent Raman spectroscopy techniques require fast and broadband tunable lasers to address all relevant spectral regions of the investigated samples. In our work, we combine a high power non-collinear optical parametric oscillator with a real-time stimulated Raman scattering spectroscopy setup. The light source is continously tunable from 700 nm to 1030 nm in less than 10 ms, delivering an average output power of more than 500 mW with sub-ps pulses. We show the immediate observation of mixing processes and the detection of microplastic particles in water solution with a spectral window of more than 2000 cm−1