Miniaturized two-channel broadband spectrometer based on variable-spacing concave blazed gratings

Abstract. Recently, it becomes a tendency for cost-effective, portable spectrometers to have more applications from scientific research to daily life, e.g., in food safety and air pollution analysis. While most spectrometers utilize plane gratings, we demonstrate a more miniaturized, two-channel, broadband spectrometer based on variable-spacing concave gratings, combining the functionality of imaging optics and diffraction grating in one component. The added degree of design freedom in the micro-sized grating spacing further corrects most optical aberrations, thus the design achieves a tiny volume of <26  ×  12  ×  10  mm3 with a high spectral resolution. Simulation results show an optical resolution of <1.6  nm in the VIS-channel (400 to 790 nm) and <3.1  nm in the NIR-channel (760 to 1520 nm). The blazed structure of grating grooves provides a high overall diffraction efficiency in the whole spectral range, more than 50% on average. To further validate the feasibility for mass production, we successfully manufactured the variable-spacing concave gratings by using diamond tooling for fabricating the master mold and hot embossing for replication. Our fabricated variable-spacing grating replicas have a diffraction efficiency up to 70% in the VIS-channel and up to 60% in the NIR-channel. We built the prototype with fabricated concave gratings, and experimental results show a good match (error  <  7  %  ) in spectral resolution with the nominal design.