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Frontiers in Optics

Optical Coherence Tomography with Undetected Photons Based on an Integrated PDC Source

Franz Roeder, René Pollmann, Michael Stefszky, Matteo Santandrea, Kai Hong Luo, Victor Quiring, Raimund Ricken, Christof Eigner, Benjamin Brecht, Christine Silberhorn

Published Jan 1, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present an optical coherence tomography scheme with undetected photons in an SU(1,1) interferometer based on an integrated nonlinear waveguide. We achieve an axial resolution of < 0.2mm in the time domain and implement differential pumping to compensate for losses in the interferometer.
DOI
10.1364/fio.2023.jtu5a.55

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Abstract Nonlinear SU(1,1) quantum interferometers based on non-degenerate optical parametric down-conversion exhibit strong unbalanced group velocity dispersion (GVD). This feature is intrinsic to this type of interferometer, as correlated photons of vastly different frequencies propagate through a dispersive nonlinear crystal; consequently, the dispersion arises from the source itself. The resulting GVD degrades the axial point-spread function in optical coherence tomography (OCT) with undetected photons; and physical compensation is not straightforward, in particular for non-degenerate broadband regimes due to the limited number of suitable materials. In this contribution, we analyze dispersion in bulk nonlinear interferometry and describe its implications for OCT imaging. Aspects of hardware compensation are addressed, and a novel empirical numerical method of compensation is proposed. The approach is based on the extraction of the phase component directly from the time-domain modality (high-precision linearized quantum Fourier transform infrared spectrometer) and its injection into the mid-infrared spectral-domain OCT signals (central wavelength of around 3770 nm) before the Fourier transform. The proposed method is evaluated using alternative numerical techniques as baseline references. The results demonstrate a 2.2-fold improvement in axial resolution in representative measurements.
Nonlinear SU(1,1) quantum interferometers based on non-degenerate optical parametric down-conversion exhibit strong unbalanced group velocity dispersion (GVD). This feature is intrinsic to this type of interferometer as correlated photons of vastly different frequencies propagate through a dispersive nonlinear crystal; consequently, the dispersion arises from the source itself. The resulting GVD degrades the axial point-spread function (PSF) in optical coherence tomography (OCT) with undetected photons; and physical compensation is less straightforward, in particular for non-degenerate broadband regimes due to the limited number of suitable materials. In this contribution, we analyze dispersion in bulk nonlinear interferometry and describe its implications for OCT imaging. Aspects of hardware compensation are addressed, and a novel empirical numerical method of compensation is proposed. The approach is based on the extraction of the phase component directly from the time-domain modality (high precision linearized quantum Fourier transform infrared spectrometer) and its injection into the mid-IR spectral-domain OCT signals (central wavelength of around 3770 nm) before the Fourier transform. The proposed method is compared with an alternative numerical technique. The results demonstrate a 2.2-fold improvement in axial resolution and outperform the alternative correction method in overall imaging performance.
We demonstrate optical coherence tomography based on an SU(1,1) nonlinear interferometer with high-gain parametric down-conversion. For imaging and sensing applications, this scheme promises to outperform previous experiments working at low parametric gain, since higher photon fluxes provide lower integration times for obtaining high-quality images. In this way one can avoid using single-photon detectors or CCD cameras with very high sensitivities, and standard spectrometers can be used instead. Other advantages are: higher sensitivity to small loss and amplification before detection, so that the detected light power considerably exceeds the probing one.