Broadband silicon nitride systems for photonic chip-based optical coherence tomography at 1060nm and 800nm

Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) is a biomedical imaging modality that plays an important role in ophthalmology. However, current clinical ophthalmic OCT systems are large and bulky, and performance improvements such as parallel imaging techniques are difficult to implement using the traditional fiber optic-based approach. Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) show great promise as a paradigm to implement high performance, miniaturized OCT systems, offering additional benefits in scalability. Advances in PIC technology have been primarily driven by telecommunications applications, which typically use wavelengths that are unsuitable for ophthalmic imaging due to the absorption of the vitreous fluid within the eye. In this work, we have developed passive integrated photonic components that are both broadband (~100nm, leading to increased OCT resolution) and operate at appropriate wavelengths for ophthalmic imaging (800nm and 1060nm).