The research found the alternative optical properties of the firefly eye from its crystalline cone. The eye of the firefly has the periodic indices of refraction and configuration of 190 parabolic layers as a one-dimensional photonic crystal on the optical axis treated ommatidium of the firefly. The paper performed anatomy of the firefly eye to reveal the structural compound eye of the firefly and simulated a dioptric portion of the firefly eye. The results realized the behavior of the visual output according to the optical raytracing by using geometric optics. The research applied the transfer matrix to observe the transmission efficiency and found that there exists the filtering capability on the optical axis. Based on the incident of collimating light, the efficiency of the superposition eye is higher than that of the apposition eye, by more 900 times.
The overall chip size is less than half of a SD card. The spectral resolution is 3~5 nm for the whole spectral range of 350~1100 nm. The first order diffraction efficiency reaches over 70% at the blaze wavelength, which is at 550 nm. The signal-to-noise ratio of the SpectroChip system is 1000:1 with 50 ms integration time. The stray light is about 0.04%. A total solution is ready to be incorporated into any smart phone, wearable devices, and handheld device systems. With the incorporation of our SpectroChip sensors, hundreds to thousands items related to personal healthcare can be added to the worldwide health analysis cloud platform.
The overall chip size is less than half of a SD card. The spectral resolution is 3~5 nm for the whole spectral range of 350~1100 nm. The first order diffraction efficiency reaches over 70% at the blaze wavelength, which is at 550 nm. The signal-to-noise ratio of the SpectroChip system is 1000:1 with 50 ms integration time. The stray light is about 0.04%. A total solution is ready to be incorporated into any smart phone, wearable devices, and handheld device systems. With the incorporation of our SpectroChip sensors, hundreds to thousands items related to personal healthcare can be added to the worldwide health analysis cloud platform.
To design a concave grating for a hyperspectral imaging (HSI) system, it is critical to achieve flat field focusing in both the horizontal and vertical directions on the image sensor. We have developed a generalized automation aberration reduction procedure (ARP) that can be applied in any cases of a concave grating spectrometer.
The concave grating, which has a free-form profile with blaze grating pitch and variable line spacing [3], is fabricated using five-axis CNC machine with nanometer machining precision for hyperspectral imaging. In order to evaluate the performance, an optical system is designed and setup to measure the focused spot size, spectral resolution and diffraction efficiency.
We have proposed an analytical 2D model [1] of a thickness gradient function for thin film deposition of a LVF for order sorting of a diffraction grating using an evaporation chamber. The LVF was fabricated and its thickness profile was measured using a probe-type surface analyzer. This study proposes an innovative method for overcoming the low production rates currently associated with LVF fabrication.
Within the 25% - 75% thickness range, the profile distribution exhibits a high degree of linearity, with R2 are greater than or equal to 0.9914 for both the cases. The LVF zone width appears to be a linear function of the mask height h, with R2 are greater than or equal to 0.9982 for all the cases. This indicates that the thickness gradient function is a more accurate model for obtaining the thickness profile of an LVF than any other modeling mentioned in previous published results. This study demonstrates that the developed theoretical 2D model can be used to predict accurately the thin film profile of an LVF.
The effective zone width of the LVF is defined as a thickness range of 25% - 75%, which appears to have high degree of linearity as a function of the mask height, h (mask-to-substrate gap). Thus, these results also confirms that the linear variable area increases as the mask-to-substrate gap increases. Thin film layer structures are constructed to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed LVF design concept. Transmission spectrum result (wavebands 400nm to 1000nm) for varying mask heights at different positions shows maximum number of wavebands with transmittance (>99.9%). Comparison of both the theoretical and the evaporating results matches satisfactorily.
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.
An optimization process to control the aberration of a concave grating is developed. The approach has a dramatic reduction in aberration and great improvement in spectral resolution.
A two-dimensional thin film thickness model based on the geometry of a commercial coater which can calculate more effectively the profiles of linear variable filters (LVFs) has been developed. This is done by isolating the substrate plane as an independent coordinate (local coordinate), while the rotation and translation matrices are used to establish the coordinate transformation and combine the characteristic vector with the step function to build a borderline which can conclude whether the local mask will block the deposition or not. The height of the local mask has been increased up to 40 mm in the proposed model, and two-dimensional simulations are developed to obtain a thin film profile deposition on the substrate inside the evaporation chamber to achieve the specific request of producing a LVF zone width in a more economical way than previously reported.
A generalized optimization process for reducing the aberration of a concave grating is developed. Our aberration reduction process is to minimize the root-mean-square spot sizes for the spectral range on the detector plane. To evaluate the performance, a model based on a previous concave grating designed for a mid-infrared (7.5 μm ~13.5 μm) spectrometer is built. The result shows that the current new approach has a dramatic improvement in aberration reduction and yields better spectral resolution.
The conventional planar grating (CPG) system has a complicated optical structure, which causes complexities in various aspects, e.g., a variety of processes such as fabrication, assembly, and alignment. The size of the CPG cannot be further reduced due to the minimum optical path length requirement imposed by the spectral resolution. This paper proposes an ultracompact grating system that is turned into a reality by a shorter optical path length through a specified grating profile. Our proposed microphotolithographic inductive coupled plasma - reactive ion etching process demonstrates that an arbitrary grating profile with high aspect ratio and small surface roughness can be achieved. The aberrations of different wavelengths are greatly reduced or eliminated. An etching depth of 30 to 60 μm is achieved. The surface roughness meets the requirement of λ/10 (50 nm). The size of the grating system is 30 × 30 × 2 mm. The resolving power R reaches 600 to 700 in the visible region.
With modern lithographic technology, a compact spectrometer is designed to include a blazed micro-grating with cylindrical concave grating profile. In order to restrict the sagittal beam divergence and to reduce the size of the spectrometer, the micro-grating is embedded inside a pair of planar mirrors used as a slab waveguide. In the simulations for the effect of the waveguide, we discover that the focal pattern distortion introduced by the waveguide causes a blunted and side-tailed peak in the spectrum. The distortion can be managed by allowing some gap between the edge of the waveguide and the image sensor. Such a configuration has greatly improved the resolving power of the micro-grating in this compact system.
A concave micrograting designed for optical communication applications was fabricated by deep x-ray lithography (DXL). The micrograting has a height of 125 µm, a grating pitch of 3 µm, a total of 2584 lines, and a sidewall root-mean-square surface roughness of 5 nm. The designed operational wavelength range is from 1475 to 1625 nm. This micrograting is embedded inside a mirror-planar waveguide to form a spectrometer chip. The Rowland-circle grating mounting scheme is used for the spectral detection. The calculated diffraction efficiency of the third-order diffraction reaches 65% when Au is coated on the grating surface and the blaze angle is suitably chosen. The measured spectral width is 1.1 nm, which is in very good agreement with the calculated result of 0.9 nm. This chip-based grating device can be used as an ultracompact spectrometer or an ultracompact wavelength-division multiplexer in optical communications. Based on this work, our DXL technique can be further developed into an x-ray LIGA method for the mass production of such chip-based spectrometers.
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