New approach to cross-polarized optical coherence tomography based on orthogonal arbitrarily polarized modes

摘要

A novel cross-polarized optical coherence tomography (CP OCT) system is developed, which is based on standard isotropic single-mode fiber. We exploit the property of an arbitrary pair of orthogonal waves propagating in a single-mode fiber to maintain their orthogonality in the absence of anistrophy losses, regardless of the induced phase anistrophy. The well known isotropic fiber based OCT scheme that commonly comprises as optical probe with a Fizeau interferometer and a compensating Michelson interferometer with Faraday mirrors is modified. We introduce an additional optical element to form the initial radiation into two mutually time-delayed and coherent waves that have strictly orthogonal polarizations. The suggested scheme allows implementation of several variants of independant detection of the initial and orthogonal polarizations with a low level of optical coupling between channels.