Acousto-optical tunable filter for a swept light source with variable transmission function

Spectrally tunable illumination is widely used for colorimetry, spectroscopy, spectral-domain optical coherence tomography and other applications. Most of the swept light sources suffer either from a limited number of spectral channels or from a spatial noise and speckles. In this paper, we discuss an approach based on acousto-optic filtration of wide-band illumination. We show experimentally that acousto-optical tunable filter (AOTF) provides a unique collection of features: arbitrary spectral tuning, multi-bandpass mode and acoustic frequency modulation. It allows assigning a number, positions and width of the spectral channels. Results of multiple experiments show that the proposed technique may become the basis of the swept light sources.