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Balanced homodyne detection in second-harmonic generation microscopy

Loc Le Xuan·François Marquier·Dominique Chauvat·Sophie Brasselet·François Treussart·Sandrine Perruchas·Cédric Tard·Thierry Gacoin·Jean-François Roch
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Abstract

We demonstrate the association of two-photon nonlinear microscopy with balanced homodyne detection for investigating second harmonic radiation properties at nanoscale dimensions. Variation of the relative phase between second-harmonic and fundamental beams is retrieved, as a function of the absolute orientation of the nonlinear emitters. Sensitivity down to approximately 3.2 photon/s in the spatio-temporal mode of the local oscillator is obtained. This value is high enough to efficiently detect the coherent second-harmonic emission from a single KTiOPO4 crystal of sub-wavelength size.

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Loc Le Xuan, François Marquier, Dominique Chauvat, Sophie Brasselet, François Treussart, Sandrine Perruchas, Cédric Tard, Thierry Gacoin, Jean-François Roch. 2006-04-15. Balanced homodyne detection in second-harmonic generation microscopy. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2356375

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