Dual-fiber stretcher as a tunable dispersion compensator for an all-fiber optical coherence tomography system

We present an all-fiber tunable dispersion compensator based on a pair of fiber stretchers made with different fiber types in which the group delay and the second-order dispersion can be tuned independently. Its efficiency is demonstrated in a fiber-based optical coherence tomography (OCT) system operating in the 800 nm wavelength range. The average sample dispersion in OCT imaging or the dispersion of transmission lines could also be compensated by our system.