Dense Multi-Wavelength Laser Clusters for Near Infrared Agricultural Spectroscopy

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRs) is widely recognized as a powerful non-invasive tool for rapid analysis of constituent components in a variety of agricultural products. Despite the power of NIRs, commercially available NIRs systems are large and expensive, consume large amounts of electrical power, and contain a number of moving parts and critical intra-system mechanical alignments. This is a fundamental consequence of the technology employed, which typically consists of a filtered white light source, and either rotating gratings or filter banks to achieve wavelength tuning over the near-infrared range. If this research is successful, it will result in a new commercially available NIRs tool with substantially reduced cost, size, and power consumption relative to existing approaches, along with increased signal to noise ratio. These factors in turn have the potential to reduce the cost of agricultural products, increase their quality, and increase the accuracy with which constituent components of such products can be known. Additionally, the multi-wavelength laser clusters developed here could be employed as monolithic multi-wavelength sources in emerging coarse wavelength division multiplexed communication systems, which currently employ discrete lasers.