Stable high-peak-power fiber supercontinuum generation for adaptive femtosecond biophotonics

Broad and safe access to ultrafast laser technology has been hindered by the absence of optical fiber-delivered pulses with tunable central wavelength, pulse repetition rate, and pulse width in the picosecond–femtosecond regime. To address this long-standing obstacle, we developed a reliable accessory for femtosecond ytterbium fiber chirped pulse amplifiers, termed a fiber-optic nonlinear wavelength converter (FNWC), as an adaptive optical source for the emergent field of femtosecond biophotonics. This accessory empowers the fixed-wavelength laser to produce fiber-delivered ∼20 nJ pulses with central wavelength across 950 to 1150 nm, repetition rate across 1 to 10 MHz, and pulse width across 40 to 400 fs, with a long-term stability of >2000 h. As a prototypical label-free application in biology and medicine, we demonstrate the utility of FNWC in real-time intravital imaging synergistically integrated with modern machine learning and large-scale fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy.