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IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 26, NO. 15, AUGUST 1, 2014
1499
Fabrication and Characteristics of Ce-Doped Fiber for High-Resolution OCT Source Chun-Nien Liu, Yi-Chung Huang, Member, IEEE, Yen-Sheng Lin, Sheng-Yuan Wang, Pi-Ling Huang, Tien-Tsorng Shih, Sheng-Lung Huang, Senior Member, IEEE, and Wood-Hi Cheng, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract— The fabrication of Ce-doped fibers (CeDFs) is demonstrated by drawing-tower method employing rod-in-tube technique. The fluorescence spectrum of CeDFs with a 16-μm core exhibited a 160-nm broadband emission with 1.45-μm axial resolution. This CeDF may be functioned as a high-resolution light source for optical coherence tomography applications. Index Terms— Fiber fabrication, cerium-doped fiber, laser biomedical application, optical coherence tomography.
I. I NTRODUCTION
O
PTICAL coherence tomography (OCT) is a rapidly developing, noninvasive image technology in biomedicine in recent years. There are several types of broadband light sources used in high axial resolution for the OCT applications [1], [2]. However, these broadband light sources did not exhibit near-Gaussian spectrum. The resolution has worsened owing to the pixel crosstalk resulted from the higher side-lobe noise of non-Gaussian spectrum. In contrast to non-Gaussian distribution, a spontaneous emission light can exhibit both broadband and near-Gaussian spectrum except for the weak power level. A fiber amplifier was employed to collect amplified spontaneous emission light in order to improve the power intensity of a light source for an OCT system [3]. The cerium-samarium doped fibers and Ce:YAG single-clad crystal fiber (CeSCF) were fabricated by LHPG method [4], [5]. However, the smaller core diameter (
