Jeffrey T. Meade

A new high-resolution, high-throughput spectrometer: first experience as applied to Raman spectroscopy

The classic trade-off between resolution and throughput in a dispersive spectrometer is overcome using virtual slit technology. An optimized spectrometer designed from the ground up to incorporate a virtual slit is experimentally demonstrated by Raman experiments.

In-depth performance analysis of the HyperFlux spectrometer

Tornado Spectral Systems introduced the HyperFluxTM spectrometer to the market in early 2012. The Hyper- Flux is the world’s first HTVS (high-throughput virtual slit) enabled spectrometer and is able to achieve much greater system flux compared to slit-based spectrometers. Since the HyperFlux’s debut extensive studies into the manufacturability, stability, and detector electronic performance have been performed and are presented in this paper. A generalized quantitative approach to spectrometer comparison by using a clearly-defined Quality Factor is presented at the end of the paper.

High-performance hyperspectral imaging using virtual slit optics

Tornado Spectral Systems (TSS) has developed High Throughput Virtual Slit (HTVS) technology that improves the performance of spectrometers by factors of several while maintaining system size. In the simplest configuration, the HTVS allows optical designers to remove the lossy slit from a spectrometer, greatly increasing throughput without a loss of resolution. This is especially useful in many standoff applications, where every photon matters. TSS has tested multiple configurations of HTVS spectral sensing and spectral imaging technology, including standoff sensing, point scan imaging, long-slit pushbroom imaging and similar configurations. The HTVS throughput-resolution advantage allows us to increase scanning speed, decrease system size, decrease aperture, decrease source intensity requirements or some combination of all four. HTVS technology expands the realm of viable spectral imaging applications. We discuss the applicability of this technology to spectral imaging and standoff sensing and present experimental results from several prototype and production spectrometers.

Simultaneous High-Resolution and High-Throughput Spectrometer Design Based on Virtual Slit Technology

The classic trade-off between resolution and throughput in a dispersive spectrometer is eliminated using virtual slit technology. An optimized spectrometer incorporating a virtual slit designed from the ground up is experimentally demonstrated.

Robust reflective pupil slicing technology

Tornado Spectral Systems (TSS) has developed the High Throughput Virtual Slit (HTVSTM), robust all-reflective pupil slicing technology capable of replacing the slit in research-, commercial- and MIL-SPEC-grade spectrometer systems. In the simplest configuration, the HTVS allows optical designers to remove the lossy slit from pointsource spectrometers and widen the input slit of long-slit spectrometers, greatly increasing throughput without loss of spectral resolution or cross-dispersion information. The HTVS works by transferring etendue between image plane axes but operating in the pupil domain rather than at a focal plane. While useful for other technologies, this is especially relevant for spectroscopic applications by performing the same spectral narrowing as a slit without throwing away light on the slit aperture. HTVS can be implemented in all-reflective designs and only requires a small number of reflections for significant spectral resolution enhancement–HTVS systems can be efficiently implemented in most wavelength regions. The etendueshifting operation also provides smooth scaling with input spot/image size without requiring reconfiguration for different targets (such as different seeing disk diameters or different fiber core sizes). Like most slicing technologies, HTVS provides throughput increases of several times without resolution loss over equivalent slitbased designs. HTVS technology enables robust slit replacement in point-source spectrometer systems. By virtue of pupilspace operation this technology has several advantages over comparable image-space slicer technology, including the ability to adapt gracefully and linearly to changing source size and better vertical packing of the flux distribution. Additionally, this technology can be implemented with large slicing factors in both fast and slow beams and can easily scale from large, room-sized spectrometers through to small, telescope-mounted devices. Finally, this same technology is directly applicable to multi-fiber spectrometers to achieve similar enhancement. HTVS also provides the ability to anamorphically “stretch” the slit image in long-slit spectrometers, allowing the instrument designer to optimize the plate scale in the dispersion axis and cross-dispersion axes independently without sacrificing spatial information. This allows users to widen the input slit, with the associated gain of throughput and loss of spatial selectivity, while maintaining the spectral resolution of the spectrometer system. This “stretching” places increased requirements on detector focal plane height, as with image slicing techniques, but provides additional degrees of freedom to instrument designers to build the best possible spectrometer systems. We discuss the details of this technology for an astronomical context, covering the applicability from small telescope mounted spectrometers through long-slit imagers and radial-velocity engines. This powerful tool provides additional degrees of freedom when designing a spectrometer, enabling instrument designers to further optimize systems for the required scientific goals.

High-Performance Spectroscopy using Virtual Slit Optics

The High Throughput Virtual Slit (HTVS(TM)) is a novel spectroscopic technology which simultaneously maximizes spectral resolution and throughput. We describe the advantages of HTVS spectrometers for Raman measurements and hyperspectral imaging.

From astronomy and telecommunications to biomedicine

Photonics is an inherently interdisciplinary endeavor, as technologies and techniques invented or developed in one scientific field are often found to be applicable to other fields or disciplines. We present two case studies in which optical spectroscopy technologies originating from stellar astrophysics and optical telecommunications multiplexing have been successfully adapted for biomedical applications. The first case involves a design concept called the High Throughput Virtual Slit, or HTVS, which provides high spectral resolution without the throughput inefficiency typically associated with a narrow spectrometer slit. HTVS-enhanced spectrometers have been found to significantly improve the sensitivity and speed of fiber-fed Raman analysis systems, and the method is now being adapted for hyperspectral imaging for medical and biological sensing. The second example of technology transfer into biomedicine centers on integrated optics, in which optical waveguides are fabricated on to silicon substrates in a substantially similar fashion as integrated circuits in computer chips. We describe an architecture referred to as OCTANE which implements a small and robust spectrometer-on-a-chip” which is optimized for optical coherence tomography (OCT). OCTANE-based OCT systems deliver three-dimensional imaging resolution at the micron scale with greater stability and lower cost than equivalent conventional OCT approaches. Both HTVS and OCTANE enable higher precision and improved reliability under environmental conditions that are typically found in a clinical or laboratory setting.

Sensing systems using chip-based spectrometers

Tornado Spectral Systems has developed a new chip-based spectrometer called OCTANE, the Optical Coherence Tomography Advanced Nanophotonic Engine, built using a planar lightwave circuit with integrated waveguides fabricated on a silicon wafer. While designed for spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) systems, the same miniaturized technology can be applied to many other spectroscopic applications. The field of integrated optics enables the design of complex optical systems which are monolithically integrated on silicon chips. The form factors of these systems can be significantly smaller, more robust and less expensive than their equivalent free-space counterparts. Fabrication techniques and material systems developed for microelectronics have previously been adapted for integrated optics in the telecom industry, where millions of chip-based components are used to power the optical backbone of the internet. We have further adapted the photonic technology platform for spectroscopy applications, allowing unheard-of economies of scale for these types of optical devices. Instead of changing lenses and aligning systems, these devices are accurately designed programmatically and are easily customized for specific applications. Spectrometers using integrated optics have large advantages in systems where size, robustness and cost matter: field-deployable devices, UAVs, UUVs, satellites, handheld scanning and more. We will discuss the performance characteristics of our chip-based spectrometers and the type of spectral sensing applications enabled by this technology.