Month: April 2017

Fourier Transform spectrometers vs. Grating spectrometers

Introduction This article compares some of the less obvious details of fourier transform spectrometers and classical grating spectrometers. It contains some apparently not-widely-known observations I made recently, but is probably not interesting to you if you are not into spectroscopy. This is also why I will skip explaining how the two spectrometers work. The article will first compare the two types of spectrometers in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, and then […]

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Poor Man’s Optics: $50 Fourier Transform Spectrometer

From my last electronics project, I had some leftover laser diodes. Because it would be very very sad to just have them lie around, I decided I should build something out of them. And since it’s a laser, it would be stupid to do something which doesn’t exploit the coherence properties of the light it emits, no? Thus, I attempted to build a fourier transform spectrometer. The setup is shown […]

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