Novel dispersion tolerant interferometry method for accurate measurements of displacement

We demonstrate that the recently proposed master-slave interferometry method is able to provide true dispersion free depth profiles in a spectrometer-based set-up that can be used for accurate displacement measurements in sensing and optical coherence tomography. The proposed technique is based on correlating the channelled spectra produced by the linear camera in the spectrometer with previously recorded masks. As such technique is not based on Fourier transformations (FT), it does not require any resampling of data and is immune to any amounts of dispersion left unbalanced in the system. In order to prove the tolerance of technique to dispersion, different lengths of optical fiber are used in the interferometer to introduce dispersion and it is demonstrated that neither the sensitivity profile versus optical path difference (OPD) nor the depth resolution are affected. In opposition, it is shown that the classical FT based methods using calibrated data provide less accurate optical path length measurements and exhibit a quicker decays of sensitivity with OPD.