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Title: High-resolution and compact serpentine integrated grating spectrometer

Integrated astrophotonic spectrometers are integrated variants of conventional free-space spectrometers that offer significantly reduced size, weight, and cost and immunity to alignment errors, and can be readily integrated with other astrophotonic instruments such as nulling interferometers. Current integrated dispersive astrophotonic spectrometers are one-dimensional devices such as arrayed waveguide gratings or planar echelle gratings. These devices have been limited to104resolving powers and<<#comment/>1000spectral bins due to having limited total optical delay paths and 1D detector array pixel densities. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a high-resolution and compact astrophotonic serpentine integrated grating (SIG) spectrometer design based on a 2D dispersive serpentine optical phased array. The SIG device combines a 5.2 cm long folded delay line with grating couplers to create a large optical delay path along two dimensions in a compact integrated device footprint. Analogous to free-space crossed-dispersion high-resolution spectrometers, the SIG spectrometer maps spectral content to a 2D wavelength-beam-steered folded-raster emission pattern focused onto a 2D detector array. We demonstrate a SIG spectrometer with∼<#comment/>100kresolving power and∼<#comment/>6750spectral bins, which are approximately an order of magnitude higher than previous integrated photonic designs that operate over a wide bandwidth, in a0.4mm2footprint. We measure a Rayleigh resolution of1.93±<#comment/>0.07GHzand an operational bandwidth from 1540 nm to 1650 nm. Finally, we discuss refinements of the SIG spectrometer that improve its resolution, bandwidth, and throughput. These results show that SIG spectrometer technology provides a path towards miniaturized, high-resolution spectrometers for applications in astronomy and beyond.

 
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Award ID(s):
1817174
NSF-PAR ID:
10250412
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Optical Society of America
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Journal of the Optical Society of America B
Volume:
38
Issue:
7
ISSN:
0740-3224; JOBPDE
Page Range / eLocation ID:
Article No. A75
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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