Study of longitudinal coherence properties of pseudo thermal light source as a function of source size and temporal coherence

Abstract: In conventional OCT, broadband light sources are generally utilized to obtain high axial resolution due to their low temporal coherence (TC) length. Purely monochromatic (i.e., high TC length) light sources like laser cannot be implemented to acquire high resolution optically sectioned images of the specimen. Contrary to this, pseudo thermal light source having high TC and low spatial coherence (SC) property can be employed to achieve high axial resolution comparable to broadband light source. In the present letter, a pseudo thermal light source is synthesized by passing a purely monochromatic laser beam through a rotating diffuser. The longitudinal coherence (LC) property of the pseudo thermal light source is studied as a function of source size and TC length. The LC length of the synthesized light source decreased as the source size increased. It is found that LC length of such light source becomes independent of the parent laser TC length for source size of greater than or equal to 3.3 mm and become almost constant at around 30 micron for both the lasers. Thus any monochromatic laser light source can be utilized to obtain high axial resolution in OCT system irrespective of its TC length. The maximum achievable axial resolution is found to be equal to 650 nm corresponding to 1.2 numerical aperture (NA) objective lens at 632 nm wavelength. The findings elucidate that pseudo thermal source being monochromatic in nature can improve the performance of existing OCT systems significantly.