1.  Home
  2. Whitepapers
  3. Resolving Power in Diffraction Gratings

Resolving Power in Diffraction Gratings

Download Whitepaper

Resolving Power in Diffraction Gratings

Download Whitepaper
In the literature, the terms resolving power and resolution are some-times interchanged. While the word power has a very specific meaning (energy per unit time), the phrase resolving power does not involve power in this way; as suggested by Hutley, though, we may think of resolving power as “ability to resolve”.The resolving power R of a grating is a measure of its ability to separate adjacent spectral lines of average wavelength λ. It is usually expressed as the dimensionless quantity R = λ / Δλ (2-18)The comments above regarding resolving power and resolution pertain to planar classical gratings used in collimated light (plane waves). The situation is complicated for gratings on concave substrates or with groove patterns consisting of unequally spaced lines, which restrict the usefulness of the previously defined simple formulas, though they may still yield useful approximations.

Download Whitepaper Now