Wide and fast wavelength-swept fiber lasers based on dispersion tuning and their application to optical coherence tomography

We recently proposed a new class of wavelength-swept lasers for swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT). It uses the same gain medium with the conventional swept lasers, but does not require any tunable filters. It is based on a principle called "dispersion tuning", in which a highly dispersive medium is inserted in the laser cavity, and loss/gain modulation is applied to mode-lock the laser. Since the cavity contains no mechanical components, such as tunable filters, we could achieve the very high sweep rate. In this review paper, we describe the principle of the dispersion-tuned swept lasers in detail and present our recent work on the application to the SS-OCT system. © 2013 The Author(s).