Highly repetitive low-coherence interferometry with time-stretch technique

We construct highly repetitive low-coherence interferometer using time-stretch technique and confirm its basic characteristics. The experimental system consists of a mode-locked laser diode (MLLD), a time-stretcher, an optical interferometer, a photodiode (PD), and a real-time oscilloscope. The ultra-short pulse from MLLD was passed through a dispersion flat fiber to generate supercontinuum light with 23.5 nm wavelength bandwidth. Repetition frequency of the laser pulse is set to be 10 MHz by the LiNbO3 modulator, and then it feeds to a time-stretcher composed of a dispersion compensation fiber (DCF) with a wavelength dispersion of 8959 ps(2). The pulse width after passing through the time-stretcher is 28.2 ns. The fiber-optic Michelson interferometer consists of a 50:50 optical fiber coupler, two collimating lenses, an objective lens and two reflective mirrors. Interference signals are detected by a photodiode (32 GHz) and recorded by a real-time oscilloscope (16 GHz, 50 GS/s). The temporal profile of the recorded interference signal is converted to an optical frequency profile. The optical path length difference is determined by Fourier transform of the spectrum. We demonstrate a preliminary measurement on the experimental system. The calculated path length difference agrees well with the actual set values. It is confirmed that the optical path length difference can be measured at a high repetition rate of 10 MHz. It is shown that the degradation of the interference signal can be prevented by considering the second order of the group delay of the DCF.