Measurement-efficient optical wavemeters.
We describe a method for efficiently determining the wavelength of a monochromatic source and provide an experimental proof-of-concept. The photomeasurement efficiency for a wavemeter can be written as eta(N,q) = (1 + logqN)/m, where N is the number of spectral channels, q is the number of distinguishable output levels per photodetector, and m is the actual number of photomeasurements made. An implementation is developed that achieves a theoretical efficiency of eta(N,q) = 1. The proof-of-concept experiment achieves efficiencies eta = O(1), where the deviation from theory is attributable to well-known optical effects and should be correctable in future versions.
Potuluri
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P
Gehm
M
M
Sullivan
M
M
Brady
D
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