Stimulated Emission Imaging

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Abstract

Stimulated emission is often described as indistinguishable from the stimulating beam, sharing the same phase, frequency, polarization, and direction of travel. What direction does stimulated emission travel when the emitter is pointlike? Pointlike sources typically emit in all directions (a spherical wave), but if the stimulating beam is nearly monodirectional (a plane wave), will the stimulated emission propagate in all directions, or just one? We perform simple experiments to explore this apparent paradox, with an eye towards technological utility. In particular, does stimulated emission encode information about an emitter's location? Can lenses use this stimulated emission to form images of emitter distributions? If so, this suggests a way to combine the high signal rates of transmitted light microscopy with the specificity of fluorescence microscopy.