Significance: Highly sensitive detection is crucial for all-optical photoacoustic (PA) imaging. However, free-space optical detectors are prone to optical aberrations, which can degrade the pressure sensitivity and result in deteriorated image quality. While spatial mode-filtering has been proposed to alleviate these problems in Fabry–Pérot-based pressure sensors, their real functional advantage has never been properly investigated.
Aim: We rigorously and quantitatively compare the performance of free-space and fiber-coupled detectors for Fabry–Pérot-based pressure sensors.
Approach: We develop and characterize a quantitative correlative setup capable of simultaneous PA imaging using a free space and a fiber-coupled detector.
Results: We found that fiber-coupled detectors are superior in terms of both signal level and image quality in realistic all-optical PA tomography settings.
Conclusions: Our study has important practical implications in the field of PA imaging, as for most applications and implementations fiber-coupled detectors are relatively easy to employ since they do not require modifications to the core of the system but only to the peripherally located detector.
We present our work in modelling the effects of optical aberrations on Fabry-Perot pressure sensor performance, as well as experimental strategies to tackle said aberrations using adaptive optics and laser mode filtering.
We introduce a general theoretical framework to study arbitrary light-cavity interactions for planar Fabry-Perot (FP) cavities and explain how optical aberrations reduce optical sensitivity by exciting higher order spatial modes. Moreover we show experimentally that the sensitivity of realistic FP cavities can be improved up to three-fold by a synergistic combination of adaptive optics (AO) and mode filtering. Finally, we discuss the challenges of achieving large sensitivity improvements under photoacoustic imaging conditions and present first results towards implementation of AO-corrected systems, as well as complementing AO with synergistic strategies for improving FP sensitivity.
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