Optimization of Dispersion and Confinement Loss of Anti-resonant Fibers for CARS Imaging from 700nm to 1200nm

In this paper, we optimize the dispersion and confinement loss of anti-resonant hollow-core fibers (AR-HCFs) to address the challenge of suppressing the non-resonant background noise caused by four-wave mixing in coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering (CARS) imaging. By systematically optimizing the parameters of AR-HCFs we show that highly efficient transmission of pump light (800 nm) and Stokes light (1040 nm) with confinement loss reduced to <0.1 dB/km and group velocity dispersion (GVD) optimized to within 2 ps/nm/km can be realized. Furthermore, the optimized AR-HCF demonstrates exceptional broadband covering 700-1200nm and robust bending resistance to maintain a low loss with bending radius larger than 5 cm. This fiber can solve the challenges in CARS imaging and may have great potential applications in high-resolution dynamic multimodal imaging and advancing real-time biological systems.