Patent Document ID: 20120120408
Application ID: 13375427
Patent Status: 0

Claim One:
1. A two-beam optical coherence tomography apparatus, comprising a wideband light source, a polarization controller, a fiber coupler, a reference arm, a sample arm and a spectrometer, said two-beam optical coherence tomography apparatus characterized in that: light from the wideband light source is linearly polarized by the polarization controller; the linearly polarized beam is split into two mutually independent polarized beams at the sample arm; and the two polarized beams are simultaneously irradiated onto two different locations in the scanning direction using a galvanometer mirror to perform scanning; and reference light from the reference arm and object light from the sample arm are merged and caused to interfere with each other to produce interference signal light, which is then passed through a diffraction grating of the spectrometer for spectroscopy and further separated into a vertical component and a horizontal component using a polarized beam splitter; the respective components are simultaneously detected with two detectors to obtain two tomography images of the same location at different times by one mechanical scan as mentioned above; and the obtained two tomography images are used to measure the amount of temporal change in phase at the same location.