NOVEL HIGH RESOLUTION, WIDE ANGLE, LOW LOSS OPTICAL FIELD FLATTENERS FOR IR HYPERSPECTRAL SENSING

The goal of this effort is to establish the feasibility and advantages of a new class of wide angle optical field flatteners which exhibit superior resolution and insertion loss when compared with other fiber-based approaches and, unlike the classical Piazzi-Smyth field flatteners, have a nearly unlimited field curvature correction range. This high performance field flattener technology is an enabler for wide-field hyperspectral sensors over the SWIR and other broad spectral regions. Further there is potential for using these elements to reduce the spectral coordinate distortion that arises in grating-based dispersive systems. Optimized configurations will be developed and used to model system performance and benefits in a hyperspectral system. During this effort the feasibility of the new field flattener technology will be demonstrated through modeling and experiment. The experiments will include construction of an experimental feasibility testbed and an investigation demonstrating the feasibility of a low-cost manufacturing technique.