STTR Phase I: Development of Compact, High-Precision Volume Grating-Based Spectrometers

The broader impact/commercial impacts of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project involve developing a new technology for analyzing light spectrum with small and affordable device. Traditional spectrometers, which are used to study light for applications like health monitoring and environmental testing, are often large, expensive, and shock sensitive. These typically rely on special components called surface gratings, which make it difficult to create compact and affordable spectrometers without sacrificing the accuracy. This project introduces a new spectrometer design with smaller size and lower complexity while maintaining high precision. By making light spectral analysis more accessible and portable, this technology could benefit many industries like healthcare and agriculture. This design can ultimately be built directly into semiconductor chips. This would bring highly precise light analysis to gadgets like smartphones, wearable health monitors, and other consumer electronics. This can create a wide range of new applications, from personal health tracking to food safety testing. This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project focuses on the development of a proof-of-principle prototype for a high-precision spectrometer based on rotated chirped Bragg gratings (r-CBGs). The project will focus on enhancing the performance of r-CBGs, including broadening the operational bandwidth and improving spectral resolution to match industry standards for color measurements and Raman spectroscopy. This entails enabling on-demand control over internal parameters of r-CBGs, such as refractive index contrast and chirp rate, to achieve target performance specifications, consequently, modifying the holographic recording mechanism to produce r-CBGs with desired specifications. The STTR project will develop a theoretical model to comprehensively study light diffraction within an r-CBG, which will be crucial for optimizing the design of the prototype, including the light coupling mechanism, placement geometry of the r-CBG and the placement of the detector. The anticipated technical results will serve as a validation of the r-CBG-based spectrometer’ capabilities in both performance and compactness. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.