Supercontinuum Generation in Silica-Based Photonic Crystal Fibers for High-Resolution Ophthalmic Optical Coherence Tomography

Abstract

Abstract Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a new technology for high-resolution cross-sectional images of biological tissues. In this paper, we design photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) made of silica with proper dispersion characteristics about the center wavelength of 800 nm to simulate supercontinuum generation (SCG) which is desired for high-resolution OCT in ophthalmology. Several types of PCFs with different air-hole diameters are designed where squared hyperbolic secant pulses are input to simulate SCG by solving generalized nonlinear Schrodinger equation (GNLSE) via split-step Fourier method. To obtain more accurate SCG, dispersion coefficients up to the 9th order, Raman scattering and self-steepening are taken into account. We examine impacts of air-hole diameter, input pulse width and pulse peak power on the SCG bandwidth as well as the OCT resolution through which suitable parameters for maximum axial resolution in ophthalmology are determined.