No Arabic abstract
Coherence properties and wavelength of light sources are indispensable for optical coherence microscopy/tomography as they greatly influence the signal to noise ratio, axial resolution, and penetration depth of the system. In the present letter, we investigated the longitudinal spatial coherence properties of the pseudo-thermal light source (PTS) as a function of spot size at the diffuser plane, which is controlled by translating microscope objective lens towards or away from the diffuser plane. The axial resolution of PTS is found to be maximum ~ 13 microns for the beam spot size of 3.5 mm at the diffuser plane. The change in the axial resolution of the system as the spot size is increased at the diffuser plane is further confirmed by performing experiments on standard gauge blocks of height difference of 15 microns. Thus, by appropriately choosing the beam spot size at the diffuser plane, any monochromatic laser light source depending on the biological window can be utilized to obtain high axial-resolution with large penetration depth and speckle-free tomographic images of multilayered biological specimens irrespective of the source temporal coherence length. In addition, PTS could be an attractive alternative light source for achieving high axial-resolution without needing chromatic aberration corrected optics and dispersion-compensation mechanism, unlike conventional setups.
In conventional OCT, broadband light sources are generally utilized to obtain high axial resolution due to their low temporal coherence (TC) length. Purely monochromatic (i.e., high TC length) light sources like laser cannot be implemented to acquire high resolution optically sectioned images of the specimen. Contrary to this, pseudo thermal light source having high TC and low spatial coherence (SC) property can be employed to achieve high axial resolution comparable to broadband light source. In the present letter, a pseudo thermal light source is synthesized by passing a purely monochromatic laser beam through a rotating diffuser. The longitudinal coherence (LC) property of the pseudo thermal light source is studied as a function of source size and TC length. The LC length of the synthesized light source decreased as the source size increased. It is found that LC length of such light source becomes independent of the parent laser TC length for source size of greater than or equal to 3.3 mm and become almost constant at around 30 micron for both the lasers. Thus any monochromatic laser light source can be utilized to obtain high axial resolution in OCT system irrespective of its TC length. The maximum achievable axial resolution is found to be equal to 650 nm corresponding to 1.2 numerical aperture (NA) objective lens at 632 nm wavelength. The findings elucidate that pseudo thermal source being monochromatic in nature can improve the performance of existing OCT systems significantly.
This comment is to show that our simulation data, based on our theory and method in Ref. [J. Phys. B 41, 055401 (2008)], are also in agreement with the experimental data presented for $D_{p}-D_{s}$ in Ref. [Phys. Rev. Lett. textbf{109}, 213901 (2012)]. We also demonstrate how to show the effect of spatial coherence on the GH shifts in this comment, therefore we disagree with the claims in Ref. [Phys. Rev. Lett. textbf{109}, 213901 (2012)].
An efficient method to tune the spatial coherence of a degenerate laser over a broad range with minimum variation in the total output power is presented. It is based on varying the diameter of a spatial filter inside the laser cavity. The number of lasing modes supported by the degenerate laser can be controlled from 1 to 320,000, with less than a 50% change in the total output power. We show that a degenerate laser designed for low spatial coherence can be used as an illumination source for speckle-free microscopy that is 9 orders of magnitude brighter than conventional thermal light.
The experimental characterization of the spatial and temporal coherence properties of the free-electron laser in Hamburg (FLASH) at a wavelength of 8.0 nm is presented. Double pinhole diffraction patterns of single femtosecond pulses focused to a size of about 10 microns by 10 microns were measured. A transverse coherence length of 6.2 microns in the horizontal and 8.7 microns in the vertical direction was determined from the most coherent pulses. Using a split and delay unit the coherence time of the pulses produced in the same operation conditions of FLASH was measured to be 1.75 fs. From our experiment we estimated the degeneracy parameter of the FLASH beam to be on the order of $10^{10}$ to $10^{11}$, which exceeds the values of this parameter at any other source in the same energy range by many orders of magnitude.
We describe an experimental technique to generate a quasi-monochromatic field with any arbitrary spatial coherence properties that can be described by the cross-spectral density function, $W(mathbf{r_1,r_2})$. This is done by using a dynamic binary amplitude grating generated by a digital micromirror device (DMD) to rapidly alternate between a set of coherent fields, creating an incoherent mix of modes that represent the coherent mode decomposition of the desired $W(mathbf{r_1,r_2})$. This method was then demonstrated experimentally by interfering two plane waves and then spatially varying the coherent between these two modes such that the interference fringe visibility was shown to vary spatially between the two beams in an arbitrary and prescribed way.