Improved Wavelength Calibration by Modeling the Spectrometer

Wavelength calibration is a necessary first step for a range of applications in spectroscopy. The relationship between wavelength and pixel position on the array detector is approximately governed by a low-order polynomial and traditional wavelength calibration involves first-, second-, and third-order polynomial fitting to the pixel positions of spectral lines from a well known reference lamp such as neon. However, these methods lose accuracy for bands outside of the outermost spectral line in the reference spectrum. We propose a fast and robust wavelength calibration routine based on modeling the optical system that is the spectrometer. For spectral bands within the range of spectral lines of the lamp, we report similar accuracy to second- and third-order fitting. For bands that lie outside of the range of spectral lines, we report an accuracy 12-121 times greater than that of third-order fitting and 2.5-6 times more accurate than second-order fitting. The algorithm is developed for both reflection and transmission spectrometers and tested for both cases. Compared with similar algorithms in the literature that use the physical model of the spectrometer, we search over more physical parameters in shorter time, and obtain superior accuracy. A secondary contribution in this paper is the introduction of new evaluation methods for wavelength accuracy that are superior to traditional evaluation.