Simulation for Small Lamellar Grating FTIR Spectrometer for Passive Remote Sensing

A miniaturized FTIR spectrometer based on lamellar grating interferometry is being developed for passive remote-sensing. Consisting of a pair of micro-mirror arrays, the lamellar grating can be fabricated using MEMS technology. This paper describes a method to compute the optical field in the interferometer to optimize the design parameters of the lamellar grating FTIR spectrometer. The lower limit of the micro-mirror width in the grating is related to the formation of a Talbot image in the near field and is estimated to be about 100 μm for the spectrometer to be used for the wavelength range of 7-14 μm. In calculating the far field at the detection window, the conventional Fraunhofer equation is inadequate for detection distance of our application, misleading the upper limit of the micro-mirror width to avoid interference from higher order diffractions. Instead, the far field is described by the unperturbed plane-wave combined with the boundary diffraction wave. As a result, the interference from the higher order diffractions turns out to be negligible as the micro-mirror width increases. Therefore, the upper limit of the micro-mirror width does not need to be set. Under this scheme, the interferometer patterns and their FT spectra are successfully generated.