I have to do straylight analysis of a grating spectrometer.
The grating diffracts into several diffraction orders.
All diffraction orders other than the nominal constitute straylight (i.e. unwanted light).
How can I apply a filter in the ray database that identifies paths for rays diffracted off the grating into a specific order?
Filter strings “Dn” or “En” (N: srf no of diffraction grating) don’t do the trick, since there is no distinction of diffraction order.
Thanks for your insights.
Best answer by Mark.Nicholson
Oooh, that’s a very good point Joachim! There is no direct way to do it.
The only workarounds I can think of are:
Look at the direction cosines of the diffracted ray:
This shows the + and -1 diffracted rays
Write a macro that traces rays one diffraction order at a time and look at them separately.
Neither is a great solution 😥
It would be good to implement this capability, as it would be very useful for stray light in diffractive systems, as you say. I don’t know how hard it is, but on the off-chance that a DN/O type filter could be implemented easily (diffracted at object N into order O) it would be a great addition.
Oooh, that’s a very good point Joachim! There is no direct way to do it.
The only workarounds I can think of are:
Look at the direction cosines of the diffracted ray:
This shows the + and -1 diffracted rays
Write a macro that traces rays one diffraction order at a time and look at them separately.
Neither is a great solution 😥
It would be good to implement this capability, as it would be very useful for stray light in diffractive systems, as you say. I don’t know how hard it is, but on the off-chance that a DN/O type filter could be implemented easily (diffracted at object N into order O) it would be a great addition.