Sci. Rep. 2, 445 (2012)

Credit: © 2012 NPG

Laser scanners are highly useful devices for sensing and imaging a wide variety of objects, but their mechanical and active electronic components limit scanning rates to around 100 kHz. Now, Keisuke Goda and co-workers at the University of California at Los Angeles and the California NanoSystems Institute, USA, have developed a laser scanner that avoids the use of mechanical parts. Instead, their device performs the scanning by using dispersive Fourier transformation to control the light dispersion. The two-step process of frequency-to-time conversion followed by time-to-space conversion allows the light to spread out both in space and time, which increases the amount of information that can be encoded onto the light. Scanning is conducted in the industrially important spectral band around 800 nm at speeds of up to 90.8 MHz. The technique can discriminate between MCF7 breast cancer cells and white blood cells. They expect the method to be useful more broadly in the biomedical industry, for example in the sensing of cells.