Rowland Circle Spectrometer

Application ID: 102401


The Rowland circle is a circle of radius R that lies tangent to a concave curved diffraction grating of radius 2R. If the entrance slit of incoming light is positioned on this circle, then rays reflected by the grating will be focused at various points along the same circle based on wavelength and diffraction order.

This tutorial model of a basic 2D Rowland circle spectrometer demonstrates how to define concave curved diffraction gratings, specify which diffraction orders to release, and track the diffraction orders of released rays using an auxiliary dependent variable.

This model example illustrates applications of this type that would nominally be built using the following products: