Brillouin signal enhancement by recycling illumination light (Conference Presentation)

Brillouin microscopy provides a non-invasive method for quantifying the mechanical properties of biological materials with diffraction-limited resolution. Since the signal of spontaneous Brillouin scattering is very weak, high laser power and ultrasensitive detection are usually required. Here, we report a new approach to enhance the signal of Brillouin microscopy by recycling the power of the illumination beam. With a multipass illumination geometry, we obtained about 3.75 times enhancement of the Brillouin signal under the same input laser power. We will present the details of the optical design as well as the experiment.