Dual-comb laser as a versatile light source for multimodal optical microscopy.

Advances in ultrafast laser technology have enabled new applications in many research fields: in optical microscopy, they led to the emergence of multiphoton and nonlinear imaging. Dual-comb lasers (DCLs) can be used to incorporate multiple imaging techniques in a single setup, without increasing the complexity of the multimodal microscope. For instance, pump-probe and polarization-resolved imaging can be enabled by directly exploiting the emission of a DCL, without the need for external active devices. Here, we use a newly developed single-cavity dual-comb laser to demonstrate proof-of-principle polarization-resolved measurements. We detect the signals resulting from the heterodyne mixing of the two combs. These interferograms encode the information about the polarimetric properties of samples at kHz rate. These new results, which complement earlier work with similar single-cavity dual-comb lasers demonstrating pump-probe sampling, pave the way to a new platform for multimodal microscopy.