Fringes of equal chromatic low orders

Abstract

A new kind of chromatic interference fringe is produced by crossing the dispersion of a plane diffraction grating by an auxiliary dispersion (a spectograph). These are called fringes of equal chromatic low orders, since they have orders of values 0, ±1, ±2,..., etc. The fringes are straight chromatic lines having a separation which is directly proportional to the wavelength. These fringes can be used to measure exactly the grating space, and they afford a continuous wavelength calibration of the auxiliary spectograph. The wavelength can be determined accurately to ±0.04% with a grating having 2000 lines of spacing 0.05 mm.