Photoacoustic microscopy based on polydimethylsiloxane thin film Fabry-Perot optical interferometer

Abstract

We present a photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) system based on a Fabry-Perot Interferometer (FPI) consisting of a transparent Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) thin film. Most of the PAM systems have limitations with the system alignment because the ultrasound transducers for detection are not transparent. Therefore, the excitation laser source should avoid the opaque transducer to illuminate the sample, which makes the system difficult to build-up. Especially, the system volume is highly limited to be compact. In our experiment, to solve these difficulties, a FPI based on the PDMS film has been implemented and applied to measure the acoustic wave signal. The system uses a FPI as an acoustic wave detector instead of a conventional ultrasound transducer. A tunable laser was used to choose the quadrature-point at which the signal has the highly sensitve and linear response to the acoustic wave. Also a 20Hz pulsed Nd:YAG laser was used to generate acoustic waves from a sample. When the acoustic waves arrive at the PDMS film, one of the surfaces of the film is modulated at the detecting point, which gives the tuned FPI interference signal. From the signal arriving time, the depth location of the sample is calculated. As a primary experiment using the PDMS thin film as an ultrasound transducer, a couple of narrow black friction tapes located in a water container were used as the samples. This proposed imaging method can be used in various applications for the detection and measurement of acoustic waves.