Ultraviolet femtosecond Kerr-gated wide-field fluorescence microscopy

Abstract

A Kerr-gated microscope capable of imaging ultraviolet luminescence with femtosecond time resolution has been developed. The system allows the spatial, spectral, and temporal measurement of UV-emitting samples. The instrumentation was optimized for emission collection in the UV, resulting in sub 90 fs time resolution of gated signals. ZnO nanowires were used to demonstrate the performance of the instrument. The evolution of the emission from a single nanowire was tracked via ultrafast transient spectroscopy and through sequential imaging. Transient dynamics were extracted from a region of intense emission on a single ZnO nanowire. This technique is a powerful tool capable of contactless ultrafast measurements of charge carrier dynamics in single nanoparticles.