Optical coherence tomography imaging and noise characterization based on 1-μm microresonator frequency combs

Abstract

Spectral-domain optical coherence tomography is a pervasive, non-invasive, in vivo biomedical imaging platform that currently utilizes incoherent broadband superluminescent diodes to generate interferograms from which depth and structural information are extracted. Advancements in laser frequency microcombs have enabled the chip-scale broadband generation of discrete frequency sources, with prior soliton and chaotic comb states examined in discrete spectral-domain optical coherence tomography at 1.3 μm. In this work, we demonstrate coherence tomography through Si3N4 microresonator laser frequency microcombs at 1 μm, achieving imaging qualities on-par with or exceeding the equivalent commercial optical coherence tomography system. We characterize the noise performance of our frequency comb states and additionally show that inherent comb line amplitude fluctuations in a chaotic state and the resultant tomograms can be compensated via multi-scan averaging.