Abstract—In this contribution we proposed and performed an optical delay line including all reflective components for long-range scanning without walk-off problem. The optical delay line is composed of a retro-reflector, an inclined reflection mirror and a scanning mirror. The size of the optical delay line is within 2 cm × 2 cm and the scanning range can reach 2.9 mm when the beam is incident at the pivot of the scanning mirror and the vibration angle of the scanning mirror is 9.6 degrees. The scanning range can be further increased when the pivot of the scanning mirror is laterally deviated from the incident beam. The optical delay line possesses the merits that it is compact, easy to fabricate and can perform rapid scanning in large scanning range without walk-off problem. The optical delay line was showed with a low-coherence reflectometer where the scanning rate was 400 Hz. A higher scanning rate was achieved when a scanning component with higher scanning rate is applied.
Index Terms—Biomedical imaging, interference, low-coherence reflectometer, rapid-scanning optical delay line, time-domain approach.
Kitsakorn Locharoenrat is with the Department of Physics, Faculty of Science, King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang, Bangkok10520 Thailand (e-mail: klkitsak@kmitl.ac.th).
I-Jen Hsu is with the Department of Physics, Chung Yuan Christian University, Chungli 32023 Taiwan (e-mail: ijhsu@cycu.edu.tw).
Cite: Kitsakorn Locharoenrat and I-Jen Hsu, "Optical Delay Line for Rapid Scanning Low-Coherence Reflectometer," International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering vol. 2, no. 6, pp. 904-906, 2012.