Supercontinuum Generation in Silica-Based Photonic Crystal Fibers for High-Resolution Ophthalmic Optical Coherence Tomography

Optical coherence tomography (OCT) is a new technology for high-resolution cross-sectional images of biological tissues. In this research, we have designed a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) made of silica with proper dispersion characteristics about the center wavelength of 800 nm to simulate supercontinuum generation (SCG) which is desired for a high-resolution OCT in ophthalmology. Several types of PCFs with different air-hole diameters are designed where squared hyperbolic secant pulses are provided to simulate SCG by solving the generalized nonlinear Schrodinger equation (GNLSE) via split-step Fourier method. To obtain more accurate SCG, dispersion coefficients up to 9th order, Raman scattering and self-steepening are taken into account. We examine the impacts of air-hole diameter, input pulse width and pulse peak power on the SCG bandwidth as well as the OCT resolution through which suitable parameters for maximum axial resolution in ophthalmology are determined.