Multiple input spectrometer
AssigneeEmcode Photonics LLC
InventorShrenik Deliwala
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Abstract
A concurrently measuring multiple light input spectrometer with a shared or common optical path is described. The spectrometer can help eliminates errors from dark offsets, can reduce impact of ambient optical and electrical noise, and can mitigate temperature effects. Additionally, it can help readily provide wavelength calibration. By using just two inputs, spectrometer can provide true spectral measurement of the test object by continuous measurement of the spectra of the source and the spectra of the source light after interacting with the test object. More generally, including an individual photodetector (instead of an array of multiple photodetectors) associated with each input can help address solving the problems that may get introduced by using multiple photodetectors for a particular input.
Claims10
A spectroscopic device for analyzing at least two independent input light sources, the device comprising:
- a spectroscopy optics housing, enclosing spectroscopy optics and including a baffle defining a first aperture arranged to receive and transmit into the housing first input light from a first input light source, the baffle also defining a second aperture, spaced apart from the first aperture, and arranged to receive and transmit into the housing second input light from a second input light source that is independent from the first input light source, the housing enclosing:
- a commonly-shared optical dispersive system to spatially disperse the first input light and the second input light, respectively received from the first input light source and the second input light source, into corresponding spectral components;
- an optical modulator, arranged to provide at least two individually modulated different spectral bin light components that are modulation encoded, using respective different time-varying modulation functions for each of the first and second input light from the corresponding first and second input light sources;
- and
- a first and a second light transducer, arranged to receive modulated light from the optical modulator corresponding to an individual one of the first and second input light sources, and to respectively produce a corresponding first and second electrical response signal in response thereto;
- and
- signal processing circuitry, coupled to the first and second light transducers to receive and digitize the first and second electrical response signals, and, using information about the respective different time-varying modulation functions, decoding the first and second electrical response signals to recover information about a respective response parameter of the individually modulated different spectral bin light components to provide a spectral bin response of the corresponding first and second input light from the corresponding first and second input light sources.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.