Measurement-efficient optical wavemeters

We describe a method for efficiently determining the wavelength of a monochromatic source and provide an experimental proof-of-concept. The photomeasurement efficiency for a wavemeter can be written as eta(N, q) = (1 + log(q)N)/m, where N is the number of spectral channels, q is the number of distinguishable output levels per photodetector, and m is the actual number of photomeasurements made. An implementation is developed that achieves a theoretical efficiency of eta(N, q) = 1. The proof-of-concept experiment achieves efficiencies eta = O(1), where the deviation from theory is attributable to well-known optical effects and should be correctable in future versions. (C) 2004 Optical Society of America.