Construction method through multiple off-axis parabolic surfaces expansion and mixing to design an easy-aligned freeform spectrometer.

Abstract

The classic Czerny-Turner spectrometer consists of a plane grating and two spherical mirrors. The optical path geometry adopted for incident and grating dispersed light is off-axis reflection, so the spherical collimating and focusing mirrors introduce coma and astigmatism. The conventional configuration is asymmetrical for coma automatic compensation, but suffers from astigmatism. We substitute the off-axis parabolic (OAP) surfaces for spherical surfaces of the collimating mirror and each sub-region of the focusing mirror, to achieve an aberration free configuration. The multiple OAP surfaces are then expanded and mixed, to construct a freeform surface integrating the collimating and focusing mirrors into a single element. Results show that a 0.1 nm spectral resolution is achieved over a bandwidth of 400 nm centered at 800 nm, in the designed spectrometer comprised of a plane grating and one freeform mirror. The construction method is advantageous to integrated optic design, and the resulting freeform mirror spectrometer is compact, and simplifies manufacture and alignment.