High-speed chemical imaging of dynamic and histological samples with stimulated Raman micro-spectroscopy.

We report a shot noise limited high-speed stimulated Raman microscopy platform allowing to acquire molecular vibrational spectra over 200 cm−1 in 12 µs at a scan rate of 40kHz. Using spectral focusing together with optimized acousto-optics programmable dispersive filters, the designed low noise imaging platform performs chemical imaging of dynamical processes such as Mannitol crystal hydration and reaches a signal to noise ratio sufficient to perform label free histological imaging on frozen human colon tissue slides.