Experimental realization of a Fresnel hologram as a super spectral resolution optical element

A highly dispersive, diffractive optical element is designed and realized for an extremely high spectral resolution spectroscopy for exoplanet telescope application. Our design uses an annular Fresnel hologram to transform incident starlight directly into a spectrogram. The recording of the hologram is accomplished using two spherical waves of different radius of curvature. The resultant hologram consists of an annular grating structure with a gradually shrinking period as a function of increasing radius. The variable period not only could bring the incoming star-light into focus, but also exhibits a large on-axis chromatic behavior. We demonstrate a dispersion of wavelength 430–700 nm over 190 mm on-axis distance, leading to a super fine spectral resolution 0.0266 nm at wavelength 515 nm for a detector size of 20 µm.