Patent ID: 7667848

Claim:
An imaging apparatus for infrared nonlinear molecular vibrational microscopy, comprising: a pump beam source for generating an infrared pump beam which excites medium molecules constituting a sample with a frequency in molecular vibration bands so as to be resonated with each other and thus forms a molecular vibration coherence; a probe beam source for generating a probe beam which detects the molecular coherence of a sample locally induced by the infrared pump beam; a beam combiner which synchronizes temporally and overlaps spatially the pump beam and probe beam on the same path; a scanner for two-dimensionally scanning the pump beam and the probe beam combined by the beam combiner; a first optical focusing system for focusing the pump beam and the probe beam scanned by the scanner on a local point within the sample; a first collecting optical system for collecting beams of which phase are shifted by the beams focused by the first optical focusing system are interacted with the sample, and for collimating the collected light into a parallel beam; a first dichroic beam splitter for removing the infrared pump beam out of the parallel beam formed by the first collecting optical system and splitting the signal beam of which phase is shifted; a reference interferometer for splitting a part of the probe beam out of the beams scanned by the scanner and generating a reference beam; an interferometric beam combiner for combining the signal beam having the shifted phase and the reference beam; a photodetector for detecting the intensity of a molecular vibrational interferometric signal between the signal beam and the reference beam which are combined by the interferometric beam combiner; and a data analyzer for acquiring the interferometric signal detected by the photodetector and generating and extracting a spectroscopic signal proportional to the degree of molecular vibrational coherence of the sample, wherein the reference interferometer is a Mach-Zehnder interferometer including a second dichroic beam splitter for passing the pump beam out of the beams scanned by the scanner and splitting a part of the probe beam, a second optical focusing system for focusing the split probe beam, a second collecting optical system for collecting the beam focused by the second optical focusing system so as to form the parallel beam, and an optical path delay controller for delaying an optical path of the parallel beam formed by the second collecting optical system, and the data analyzer measures amplitude modulation of the interferometric signal to obtain phase difference between the signal beam having the modulated phase and the reference beam.