Abstract
We demonstrate a novel electro-optic swept source for wavenumber-linear interferometric sensing and imaging applications. The electro-optic swept source based on an acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF) provides high environmental stability and arbitrary drive function sweeping because the electro-optic wavelength selection does not depend on a mechanical moving component to tune the output lasing wavelength. We show improved stability of the suggested electro-optic swept source, compared to a conventional swept source based on a fiber Fabry–Perot tunable filter (FFP-TF). Various types of wavelength sweeping are demonstrated by applying the programmed drive function to the applied radio frequency (RF) of the AOTF. We demonstrated improved image quality of optical coherence tomography (OCT) by using the wavenumber-linear drive function of a simple triangular signal, which has a high wavenumber-linearity with an R-square value of 0.99991.
Highlights
Swept sources have been widely used in various interferometric sensing and imaging applications, such as optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) sensors [1] and swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT) images [2,3,4]
We propose and experimentally demonstrate an electro-optic swept source based on an acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF)
The high wavenumber linearity (R-square value of 0.99991) is represented with a simple triangular drive function to obtain linearity (R-square value of 0.99991) is represented with a simple triangular drive function to obtain an improved quality OCT image compared to the sinusoidal drive function
Summary
Swept sources have been widely used in various interferometric sensing and imaging applications, such as optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR) sensors [1] and swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT) images [2,3,4]. The improved linearity of output wavenumber (k) versus sweeping time is an especially important parameter because the optical interference fringe on the linearized wavenumber (k) scale is essential for the domain conversion process with fast Fourier transformation (FFT) in OFDR sensors and SS-OCT imaging applications [5,6,7,8]. We implemented a linearly wavenumber-swept uni-directional fiber-ring laser based on an acousto-optic tunable filter (AOTF) for interferometric sensing and imaging applications. It has been known that the filtered AOTF has the physically linearized relation between the optical frequency and acoustic frequency [16,17] It means that only a simple triangular drive function is needed to ensure a linearly sweeping wavenumber in the time domain, instead of a specially programmed drive function with respect to time [18,19,20,21,22]. The acquired 2D-OCT images are compared in parallel by applying both sinusoidal and wavenumber-linear drive functions
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