Determination of groove spacings for concave diffraction gratings

A long trace profiler (LTP) based method has been reported to measure the groove density of a concave grating with a curvature radius 14346.8 mm. It is appropriate for gratings with a sufficiently large curvature radius. Measurements of the groove density of a concave or convex grating with a small curvature radius could be problematic. A system based on a diffraction method and developed to check the groove variation of variable line spacing (VLS) gratings was used to measure a concave grating at NSRL recently and is the subject of this paper. For a grating with a small radius of curvature, the off-axis errors become dominant factors determining the system uncertainty. The errors are evaluated, and a correction algorithm is developed. A commercially available concave grating with a curvature radius of 750 mm was measured. The maximum relative groove density error (ΔN/N) was 3×10−5.