Highly-chirped Bragg gratings for integrated silica spectrometers

A blazed chirped Bragg grating in a planar silica waveguide device was used to create an integrated diffractive element for a spectrometer. The grating diffracts light from a waveguide and creates a wavelength dependent focus in a manner similar to a bulk diffraction grating spectrometer. An external imaging system is used to analyse the light, later device iterations plan to integrate detectors to make a fully integrated spectrometer. Devices were fabricated with grating period chirp rates in excess of 100 nm mm^-1, achieving a focal length of 5.5 mm. Correction of coma aberrations resulted in a device with a footprint of 20 mm×10 mm, a peak FWHM resolution of 1.8 nm, a typical FWHM resolution of 2.6 nm and operating with a 160 nm bandwidth centered at 1550 nm.