Compact high-resolution Littrow conical diffraction spectrometer.

This paper presents a compact high-resolution Littrow conical diffraction spectrometer (LCDS) that includes an echelle grating for horizontally dispersing the incident light beam into several high diffraction orders, a prism for vertically separating the overlapping diffraction orders, and a shared focusing lens used for both the incident and dispersed beams. The unique design of the optics enables the LCDS to give high dispersion on the detector without requiring a large field of view and, therefore, to achieve the benefits of high spectral resolution and compactness. The use of the Littrow conical diffraction coupled with the shared focusing lens makes the LCDS more compact. The formulas of the footprint of the dispersed spectra are derived, and the numerical simulation is given. The design calculations for application of the LCDS to an optical coherence tomography system are illustrated by an example.