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Abstract

A spectrometer that provides the ability to combine the advantages of high resolution, compactness, ruggedness, and low-power consumption of Fabry-Perot (FP) tunable filter spectrometer, with the multi-channel multiplexing advantage of FT and/or grating/detector array. The key concept is to design and operate a tunable FP filter in a multiple-order condition. This filter is then followed by a 'low-resolution' fixed grating, which disperses the filtered n-order signal into a preferably matched N-element detector array for parallel detection. The spectral resolution in this system is determined by the FP filter, which can be designed to have very high resolution. The N-order parallel detection scheme reduces the total integration or scan time by a factor of N to achieve the same signal to noise ratio (SNR) at the same resolution as the single channel tunable filter method. This design is also very flexible, allowing spectrometer systems with appropriate order N to thereby optimize the system performance for spectral resolution and scan integration time. In addition to the significant reduction in scan integration time, there are two other advantages to this approach. The first, because the FP tunable filter is designed and operated under n-orders, the fabrication tolerances of the FP filter cavity and operating conditions are significantly loosened.

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