Smoke and Mirrors: Ultra-Rapid-Scan FT-IR
Spectrometry
This slide shows a series of variations on the precessing disk
interferometer. The same tilt-compensating optics can be used with a variety of planar
reflectors with considerable freedom for implementing mirror motion - tilt, translation
and shear are represented here. These designs appear to be novel to spectroscopic uses,
but at least one has appeared in the prior art of metrology. The general disadvantages of
all of these designs (for spectroscopic applications) are that the cube corner and planar
reflectors must have apertures at least twice as large as the collimated beam diameter,
the folding requires that the beam paths be relatively long, and the resolution is limited
by the movement of the beam images on the disk. These are acceptable tradeoffs in certain
cases.
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