Line scanning mechanical streak camera for phosphorescence lifetime imaging.

Phosphorescence lifetime measurement holds great importance in life sciences and material sciences. Due to the long lifetime of phosphorescence emission, conventional approaches based on point scanning time-domain recording suffer from long recording time and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To overcome these difficulties, we developed a line scanning mechanical streak camera for parallel and high SNR imaging. This design offers three key advantages. First, hundreds to thousands of pixels can be recorded simultaneously at high throughput. Second, hundreds of excitation can be accumulated on a single camera frame and read out at once with high quantum efficiency (QE) and low read noise. Third, the system is very simple, only requiring a camera and a scanner. Using a confocal line scanning configuration, we imaged samples of various lifetime ranging from tens of nanoseconds to hundreds of microseconds, which demonstrated the versatility and advantages of this method.