Spectrograph Design Fundamentals

Abstract

This book was first published in 2007, a time of enormous change in the field of optical spectrometry. Although the basic optical principles remained unchanged, the design considerations were very different and, in many cases, more demanding. Developments in computer ray-tracing and computer-aided design coped with the extra impositions and allowed the construction of a new generation of spectrographs. The book covers the general principles of spectrographic design at the time, and the practical and engineering aspects of a broad range of spectrographs and spectrometers. The book deals with materials and methods of construction and includes suggestions for the choice of optical table, the design of slit mechanisms, and adjustable mirror, grating and lens mounts, with suggestions for the alignment and calibration of the finished instrument.

High-speed hyperspectral video acquisition with a dual-camera architecture

“…Conventional spectrometers simply trade temporal resolution for spatial/spectral resolution, and thus lose the ability to record dynamic scenes [7,19]. For example, pushbroom or whiskbroom based methods capture the spectral information of a slit or a single point of the scene, and spatially scan the whole scene to obtain a full hyperspectral image [4,30].…”

“…Unfortunately, conventional spectrometers have to confront a tradeoff between spatial/spectral and temporal resolution, as they need to scan the scene along either spatial or spectral dimension to capture a full hyperspectral image [19,31,7,26]. Therefore, conventional spectrometers are not suitable for measuring dynamic scenes.…”

High-resolution proximity lithography for nano-optical components

“…They define a class of optical components which have found versatile applications e.g. in spectrometers [8,9] since the early days of optical instrumentation [10,11] and are essential building blocks for modern optical systems [12][13][14][15][16], light sources [17][18][19][20][21], and optical communication devices [22][23][24]. Recently, many novel optical nanostructures with unique functionality have appeared: Wire grid polarizers (WGP) [25][26][27] can achieve polarization discrimination over a broad spectral range and even for deep ultra-violet (DUV) wavelengths.…”

Optofluidic Grating Spectrograph on a Chip

“…The Czerny-Turner mounting is arguably the most flexible and popular arrangement for grating spectrographs employing plane reflection gratings [7]. In this mounting, as shown in Figure 2, two spherical mirrors are used as collimating and focusing elements.…”

“…The whole spectrograph is immersed in a two-dimensional slab waveguide with effective index of 1.41. We also designed the spectrograph to satisfy the Rosendahl condition and flat-field condition [7]. The 2D waveguide structure and the small size also contribute to reduce the optical aberrations.…”