Simultaneous and localized measurement of diffusion and flow using optical coherence tomography

We report on the simultaneous and localized measurement of the diffusion coefficient and flow velocity based on the normalized autocorrelation function using optical coherence tomography (OCT). Our results on a flowing suspension of polystyrene spheres show that the flow velocity and the diffusion coefficient can be reliably estimated in a regime determined by the sample diffusivity, the local flow velocity, and the Gaussian beam waist. We experimentally demonstrate that a smaller beam waist results in an improvement of the velocity sensitivity at the expense of the precision and accuracy of the estimation of the diffusion coefficient. Further, we show that the decay of the OCT autocorrelation function due to flow depends only on the Gaussian beam waist irrespective of the sample position with respect to the focus positio