Brillouin spectroscopy is able to measure material’s mechanical properties by analyzing the optical spectrum of acoustically-induced light scattering within a sample. In the past decade, the development of high-resolution Brillouin spectrometers based on virtually-imaged phased array (VIPA) has greatly increased the spectral detection efficiency thus enabling mechanical characterization of biological tissue and biomaterials. Further improvements in spectrometer performances have enabled in vivo measurements at safe power levels and 2D/3D imaging of biological cells. However, it remains a slow technique compared to other imaging modalities, because only one point of the sample can be measured by the traditional backward-scattering configuration at a time. In this work, we demonstrate a parallel detection configuration with 90-degree geometry where the Brillouin shift of hundreds of points in a line can be measured simultaneously. In a 1.1mm-by-1.5mm samples, this novel configuration effectively shortens the acquisition time of 2D Brillouin imaging from hours to ~30 seconds with spatial resolution of ~3um, thus making it a powerful technology for label-free mechanical characterization of tissue and biomaterials.
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