Selective excitation with shaped pulses transported through a fiber using reverse propagation

Abstract

Reverse propagation is a numeric technique that makes it possible to obtain arbitrarily shaped pulses after propagation through a fiber in the nonlinear regime. We apply it to achieve selective two-photon excitation of dyes that have overlapping absorption spectra with pulses transported through the fiber. By comparing both contrast and signal level it is shown that phase and amplitude shaped pulses generated using reverse propagation are superior to pulses with antisymmetric phase despite loss caused by amplitude shaping.