Broadband Source for Optical Coherence Tomography at 1064 nm Using Silica-based Microstructured Optical Fiber

Supercontinuum spectra are generated using microstructured optical fibers (MOFs) fabricated indigenously for utilization as broadband source in ultrahigh-resolution optical coherence tomography. The MOFs have different structural, dispersive and nonlinear properties, thus generating SC spectra with different bandwidths when pumped anomalously at 1064 nm. For all the MOFs, theoretically determined axial resolution shows improvement than existing sources. Theoretical axial resolution of 0.678 μm was achieved from one of the MOFs which is one of the lowest values till now. Hence our MOFs can be used as efficient broadband source in OCT to obtain ultrahigh axial resolution in the sub-micron level.