Design for an aberration-corrected concave grating for a mid-infrared long-slit spectrometer

A new design for an aberration-corrected concave grating for the spectral region near 10 mu m is presented. It was designed for use in the ground-based astronomical medium-resolution (lambda/Delta lambda similar to 100) Mid-Infrared Camera and Spectrometer (MICS). It provides a flat focal plane for a wide spectral range (7.5-13.5 mu m) with small aberrations, permitting efficient long-slit observations in the mid-infrared region. It permits a simple design of the spectrometer without collimator and camera mirrors, which is quite advantageous for cryogenic instruments. The grating has variable spacing grooves to reduce aberrations. In addition, the grating surface figure is designed to be toroidal and in the direction perpendicular to the grooves, aspherical, to suppress the aberrations further over a wide spectral range. The angle of the grooves is also varied to yield better efficiency near the blaze angle. The grating was fabricated by high-quality ultraprecision machining, which made these features possible. Test observations confirmed that the designed spectral resolution was achieved. (C) 2000 Optical Society of America.