Begin by setting up the pulsed laser system, centered at 1025 nanometers. Guide the output of the seed laser into a commercial Optical Parametric Amplifier, or OPA, to generate a mid-infrared or mid-IR beam. Tune the mid-IR beam to the frequency of interest.
Pass the residual 1025 nanometer beam from OPA through a Fabry-Perot etalon to produce a spectrally-narrowed up-conversion beam. Spatially filter the narrowed beam with an eight-micron sapphire pinhole. Control the polarization of the 1025 nanometer pulse with a lambda by two wave plate.
Next, guide the mid-IR beam through a delay stage for fine control of the temporal overlap. Control the polarization of the mid-IR with a lambda by two wave plate. Spatially overlap both the up-conversion and mid-IR beams at a customized Dichroic Mirror, or DM, that is transmissive to mid-IR and reflective to near-IR.
Use two irises to guide the alignment, one right after the DM and one at the far end. Use a power meter after the iris to determine whether mid-IR is centered, and use a near-IR card to locate near-IR positions. Direct the overlapped beams into an inverted microscope with an integrated 325 hertz, single-axis, resonant beam scanner that is mounted to an integrated two-position scanner, or I2PS.
Focus the two spatially-overlapped beams onto the sample with a purely reflective Schwarzschild Objective, SO.Collect the Vibrational Sum Frequency Generation, or VSFG, signal generated by the sample with an infinity-corrected Refractive Objective, RO.Guide the collimated output VSFG signal through a linear polarizer and then through a telecentric tube lens system composed of two focal lenses, TL1 and TL2, each having a 60 millimeter focal length. To switch to the Second Harmonic Generation, or SHG mode, block the IR beam and rotate the grading of the spectrograph to 501.5 nanometers. To switch to bright-field optical imaging.
Turn on the white light source. Move the integrated slider, I2PS, to collect bright-field images in the counterpropagating direction. With the imaging objective, RO, acting as the condenser and the condenser objective, SO, acting as the imaging objective.
Then use a commercially available two-blends system to form an image of the collimated output of the RO at the sensor plane of an RGB bright-field camera. Use a standard one-micron-thick sample of zinc oxide pattern sputter coated on a coverslip to roughly optimize the position of the sample plane or the nanopositioner z-axis by bringing it into bright-field focus, using the bright-field imaging modality. Turn on the resonant beam scanner to collect a line of images.
After the line section of the sample is hyperspectrally imaged, scan the sample in the axis perpendicular to the line scanning axis using the three-dimensional nano positioner. Take vertical slices of the image data and establish the pixel-to-micron ratio.
