A low-cost second harmonic generation (SHG) microscope was constructed, and, for the first time, SHG microscopy was used for imaging agrochemical materials directly on the surface of common commercial crop leaves. The microscope uses a chromatically fixed (1560 nm) femtosecond fiber laser, a commercial 2D galvanometer mirror system, and a PCIe digital oscilloscope card, which together kept total instrument costs under $40 000 (USD), a significant decrease in cost and complexity from common systems (commercial and home-built) using tunable lasers and faster beam-scanning architectures. The figures of merit of the low-cost system still enabled a variety of measurements of agrochemical materials.
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