Re: ultra small spectrometer yields the power of a 1000 times bigger device

On 25/10/2024 04:41, Jan Panteltje wrote:

Ultra-small spectrometer yields the power of a 1,000 times bigger device
The tiny, relatively inexpensive devices could be used for customized astronomy research
  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/10/241023130905.htm
Summary:
     Researchers are designing new ways to make spectrometers that are ultra-small but still very powerful, to be used for anything from detecting disease to observing stars in distant galaxies.
 Seems a clever way to do, see picture of it here:
  https://news.ucsc.edu/2024/10/schmidt-bundy-24.html

It is certainly a novelty and may work in some research where a very compact high resolution robust portable spectrometer might be useful. Identifying pigments on fake grand master paintings for instance. The kit is down to suitcase size (from half a room full of kit).
It strikes me that calibration of the waveguide is everything and trusting AI to learn the patterns for each wavelength may not work for continuum spectroscopy even if it works well for emission line spectra.
It sounds just a bit too good to be true...
The last really cute trick was high resolution grating one way and prism at not quite right angles so as to map a line spectrum onto a normal rectangular CCD array. PE had a nice example of that in the 90's.
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Martin Brown