Abstract
Optical technology in the mid-infrared wavelength range is currently a rapidly developing field initiated by the availability of novel high-power and spatially coherent sources. Non-destructive testing techniques based on these sources are very promising for industrial and medical applications. However, there are still many engineering problems due to the technical challenges and high prices of the optical elements suitable for the mid-infrared region. In this paper, we report the development and performances of the first mid-infrared Fourier-domain optical coherence tomography based on a supercontinuum source and low-cost pyroelectric detector. The system is designed to operate in the spectral region around 4 μm. Experimental results are demonstrated for detections of embedded microstructures in ceramic materials and subsurface oil paint layers.
Highlights
The growing development of high-power, low-noise, mid-infrared (MIR) supercontinuum sources raised a great interest for optical imaging and characterization techniques in medical diagnosis or non-destructive testing (NDT) for engineering materials, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) and spectroscopy [1]
The MIR Fourier-domain OCT (FD-OCT) cross-sectional scans (B-scans) and A-scans of the simple ceramic plate structures were measured in order to prove the feasibility of the concept
To verify the results and compare the performance, the images of the same samples were obtained with a commercial NIR FD-OCT system (Thorlabs Vega, λc = 1.3 μm)
Summary
The growing development of high-power, low-noise, mid-infrared (MIR) supercontinuum sources raised a great interest for optical imaging and characterization techniques in medical diagnosis or non-destructive testing (NDT) for engineering materials, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) and spectroscopy [1]. The original time-domain OCT (TD-OCT) [8] with a semiconductor point detector and an axially-scanning reference mirror, performing a cross-correlation between reference and sample fields, is a well-established technique Such systems operating in the MIR range were shown in [9, 10] and a system applying the wavelength conversion technique is shown in [11]. Up-conversion modules are becoming a promising tool but such systems are still under development and are costly, technically complex and drawbacks include the low spectral resolution and the nonlinearity of conversion at the wavelengths of interest [17,18,19,20] In this contribution, we demonstrate the first MIR FD-OCT applying a low-cost pyroelectric detector and a supercontinuum source
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