Coherent fiber bundles (CFB) are commonly used for endoscopic imaging, e.g. in biomedicine. Usually a CFB with several ten thousand cores is employed together with a lens system on its distal end. However, pixelation effects occur and the imaging plane can’t be scanned, limiting the field of application of CFBs.
To circumvent these limitations, a spatial light modulator (SLM) is employed on the proximal side of a single-mode CFB. This enables creating arbitrary wave fronts at the distal fiber end, e.g. for instance for optical tweezers, endoscopes with tunable image plane or for exciting transgenetic nerve cells. However, of the shelf CFBs show phase distortions between individual cores (e.g. coupling between cores, speckle effect) which need to be calibrated and corrected at the proximal side.
These distortions depend on the wavelength, temperature, polarization and most importantly on the bending of the CFB. Therefore an on-line calibration during bending variations is required. For this purpose a semitransparent mirror is employed at the distal fiber end, which allows to measure double the distortion at the proximal side by digital holography without the need for a guide star. For correcting the distortion the same SLM as above is employed.
However, the distortion for a single transmission through the CFB commonly exceeds several 2 pi. Thus, an incremental phase measurement yields unambiguous results. To circumvent this problem, two approaches for on-line calibration are compared. 1st Multiple wavelength holography and 2nd initial calibration in transmission mode with subsequent tracking of distortion changes in reflecting mode.
|