Optical coherence tomography with a nonlinear interferometer in the high parametric gain regime

Abstract

We demonstrate optical coherence tomography based on an SU(1,1) nonlinear interferometer with high-gain parametric down-conversion. For imaging and sensing applications, this scheme promises to outperform previous experiments working at low parametric gain, since higher photon fluxes provide lower integration times for obtaining high-quality images. In this way one can avoid using single-photon detectors or CCD cameras with very high sensitivities, and standard spectrometers can be used instead. Other advantages are: higher sensitivity to small loss and amplification before detection, so that the detected light power considerably exceeds the probing one.