Continuous Phase-Shifting Holography Utilizing a Moving Diffraction Grating

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel digital lensless microscopy method using a moving diffraction grating for high-precision fiber splice detection in OCT probe fabrication, leveraging continuous phase-shifting holography for enhanced accuracy.

Contribution

It presents a new optical setup with a movable Ronchi grating and a continuous phase-shifting technique for precise, stable, and compact fiber splice imaging in constrained environments.

Findings

Achieved 1 μm spatial resolution in fiber splice imaging.

Demonstrated robustness of the phase-shifting method against errors.

Developed theoretical framework for background noise suppression.

Abstract

Fabrication of optical coherence tomography (OCT) fiber probes in cardiology involves sequentially splicing and cleaving multiple fibers to form a lens. During this process, the splice location-normally invisible under standard illumination-must be identified with micron-level accuracy. This paper presents an approach for splice detection using digital lensless microscopy, which is well-suited for deployment within the restricted space constraints typically found in fiber-fabrication setups. The optical setup incorporates a movable Ronchi grating that simultaneously acts as a beam splitter and a phase modulator. This design enables spatial separation of the reference and object beams while preserving the inherent stability of common-path interferometry. The acquired hologram set is processed using the continuous phase-shifting technique, which is known for its robustness against phase-shifting errors. The theoretical foundations for recording such holograms have been developed, and the conditions under which background noise and the conjugate order are suppressed have been identified. Experiments demonstrated the acquisition of high-contrast quantitative phase images of fiber splices with a spatial resolution down to 1 $\mu m$.