PROCEEDINGS ARTICLE | July 28, 2014
Proc. SPIE. 9147, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V
KEYWORDS: Diffraction, Spectrographs, Optical design, Astronomy, IRIS Consortium, Thirty Meter Telescope, Modulation, Polarization, Spectral resolution, Diffraction gratings
Maximizing the grating efficiency is a key goal for the first light instrument IRIS (Infrared Imaging Spectrograph)
currently being designed to sample the diffraction limit of the TMT (Thirty Meter Telescope). Volume Phase
Holographic (VPH) gratings have been shown to offer extremely high efficiencies that approach 100% for high line
frequencies (i.e., 600 to 6000l/mm), which has been applicable for astronomical optical spectrographs. However, VPH
gratings have been less exploited in the near-infrared, particularly for gratings that have lower line frequencies. Given
their potential to offer high throughputs and low scattered light, VPH gratings are being explored for IRIS as a potential
dispersing element in the spectrograph. Our team has procured near-infrared gratings from two separate vendors. We
have two gratings with the specifications needed for IRIS current design: 1.51-1.82μm (H-band) to produce a spectral
resolution of 4000 and 1.19-1.37μm (J-band) to produce a spectral resolution of 8000. The center wavelengths for each
grating are 1.629μm and 1.27μm, and the groove densities are 177l/mm and 440l/mm for H-band R=4000 and J-band
R=8000, respectively. We directly measure the efficiencies in the lab and find that the peak efficiencies of these two
types of gratings are quite good with a peak efficiency of ~88% at the Bragg angle in both TM and TE modes at H-band,
and 90.23% in TM mode, 79.91% in TE mode at J-band for the best vendor. We determine the drop in efficiency off the
Bragg angle, with a 20-23% decrease in efficiency at H-band when 2.5° deviation from the Bragg angle, and 25%-28%
decrease at J-band when 5° deviation from the Bragg angle.
