Chemically Etched Single Mode Fiber Tip for High Lateral Resolution Imaging in Optical Coherence Tomography

In this paper, we propose a high lateral resolution common-path Fourier domain optical coherence tomography (OCT) system with the use of a chemically etched single mode fibre. In our experiments, a single mode optical fibre of 840 nm was used for preparing the tapered tips. Our system used a conical microlens that was chemically etched by a selective chemical etching technique using an etching solution of buffered hydrofluoric acid (BHF). From the experimental results, we verified that our proposed optical coherence tomography system could operate as a common-path Fourier domain OCT system and the apex angle of the chemically etched single mode fibre tip was a very important parameter for generating high-resolution OCT images.