Concave diffraction gratings fabricated with planar lithography

This paper reports on the development and validation of a new technology for the fabrication of variable line-spacing non-planar diffraction gratings to be used in compact spectrometers. The technique is based on the standard lithographic process commonly used for pattern transfer onto a flat substrate. The essence of the technology presented here is the lithographic fabrication of a planar grating structure on top of a flexible membrane on a glass or silicon wafer and the subsequent deformation of the membrane using a master shape. For the validation of the proposed technology we fabricated several reflection concave diffraction gratings with the f-numbers varying from 2 to 3.8 and a diameter in the 4 – 7 mm range. A glass wafer with circular holes was laminated by dry-film resist to form the membranes. Subsequently, standard planar lithography was applied to the top part of the membranes for realizing grating structures. Finally the membranes were deformed using plano-convex lenses in such a way that precise lens alignment is not required. A permanent non-planar structure remains after curing. The imaging properties of the fabricated gratings were tested in a three-component spectrograph setup in which the cleaved tip of an optical fiber served as an input slit and a CCD camera was used as a detector. This simple spectrograph demonstrated subnanometer spectral resolution in the 580 – 720 nm range.Electronic Instrumentation LaboratoryElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc