Competence between spatial and temporal coherence in full field optical coherence tomography and interference microscopy

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    69 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    Distinction between spatial and temporal coherence characteristics of the interferogram from low-coherence microscopic systems is investigated. It is shown that the coherence region is determined by the temporal coherence only when the path length difference is scanned in a region where the reference and sample beams are collimated, that is, containing a single spatial frequency. Spatial coherence has an effect when the path length scan is performed with a non-collimated beam, such as a defocus scan of a lens where the focal depth of the lens mainly determines the coherence region. In the latter case, the fringe size for a monochromatic light is smaller than half the wavelength by a factor determined by the spatial coherence. A new analytic relation is derived for the fringe size showing that it has better validity than the Ingelstam relation in the high NA region.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number004
    Pages (from-to)952-958
    Number of pages7
    JournalJournal of Optics A: Pure and Applied Optics
    Volume8
    Issue number11
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 1 Nov 2006

    Keywords

    • Coherence
    • Interference microscopy
    • Optical coherence tomography

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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