Electrothermal MEMS fiber scanner for optical endomicroscopy

Abstract

We report a novel MEMS fiber scanner with an electrothermal silicon microactuator and a directly mounted optical fiber. The microactuator comprises double hot arm and cold arm structures with a linking bridge and an optical fiber is aligned along a silicon fiber groove. The unique feature induces separation of resonant scanning frequencies of a single optical fiber in lateral and vertical directions, which realizes Lissajous scanning during the resonant motion. The footprint dimension of microactuator is 1.28 x 7 x 0.44 mm(3). The resonant scanning frequencies of a 20 mm long optical fiber are 239.4 Hz and 218.4 Hz in lateral and vertical directions, respectively. The full scanned area indicates 451 mu m x 558 mu m under a 16 V-pp pulse train. This novel laser scanner can provide many opportunities for laser scanning endomicroscopic applications.