Fig. 2.

Effect of CRS detection fiber size on SNR and axial resolution. Measurements of SNR and axial resolution were made using a polished Si substrate, and evaluating the intensity of the 520 cm⁻¹ peak. The plot of SNR vs. detection fiber size (a) shows a sharp improvement when going from an 8 μm detection fiber to a 50 μm fiber. The plot of axial resolution vs. detection fiber size (b) shows the degradation in axial resolution with increasing fiber size. Both (a) and (b) demonstrate the performance improvements offered by the BK7 hemisphere. All measurements were made using the 50x objective lens.