Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering | 2021
Compact Optical Autocorrelator with 0.1-Meter Scanning Range Using a Rotating Pair of Mirrors
Abstract
We present a rotating pair of mirrors based optical autocorrelator which is capable of providing a 0.1 m scanning range. The rotating mirror-pair technique enables rapid data update-rate, compactness, and simpler data post-processing compared to that of conventional linear motion-based optical autocorrelators. We optimized the geometrical design of the mirror-pair configuration by using off-the-shelf mirrors and conducted a simulation to calculate the expected capability of the scanning range. By exploiting a He-Ne laser as a light source, we validated the performance of the autocorrelator in its provision of a 100 mm scanning range and 0.2 Hz data update-rate, which was limited by the adopted commercial data sampling device, and not limited by the proposed principle. The developed autocorrelator is expected to be adopted for various applications that require sub-cm spectroscopic resolution.