Design and verification of an aberration-corrected free-form concave blaze grating with variable line spacing for hyperspectral imaging (Conference Presentation)

Abstract

A flat-field aberration corrected concave blaze grating for 400-1100nm is designed and fabricated. The concave grating, which has a free-form profile with blaze grating pitch and variable line spacing, is fabricated using five-axis CNC machine with nanometer machining precision. An optical system is setup to measure the focused spot size, spectral resolution and diffraction efficiency to evaluate the performance of aberration-corrected concave grating. The blaze grating reaches a diffraction efficiency of 70%. The focused vertical spot size is 50µm, which indicates a 50µm spatial resolution at the image plane. The focused horizontal spot size is 300µm, which converts to a spectral resolution of 6nm. The design methodology can be applied to an Offner type hyperspectral imager with a free-form convex grating and variable line spacing to achieve high efficiency and high spatial and high spectral resolving power.