Calibration of a photodiode array spectrometer against the copper point

S. G. R. Salim1, E. R. Woolliams2, N. P. Fox2

1

National Institute for Standards (NIS), President Sadat Street, El-Haram, Giza, PO Box 136, Egypt 2 National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Hampton Road, Teddington, TW11 0LW, United Kingdom

Introduction

Calibration method and data analysis

During calibration, the temperature of the spectrometer was kept at 20 C 0.1 C. This was controlled using a simple, yet efficient method, which made use of water flowing through silicone rubber tubing wrapped around the spectrometer. Before use, the system was carefully aligned and the alignment was checked during the time when the copper point was held in its molten state. An automatic system was used to record the spectrometer signal for all pixels during the freeze cycle of the copper-point blackbody. Measurements were taken with a 10 ms integration time and 1000 measurements were averaged to minimise the effect of noise. Noise-to-signal ratio at this setting was of the order of 10-4. This created an effective signal recorded every 10 s during the approximately 50-minute freeze process. The signal at 800 nm (chosen as a wavelength with good signal-to-noise) was used to identify the start and end of the freeze plateau. There was a period of 7 minutes during which the blackbody radiance at 800 nm was stable within 0.02 %. This time period was then averaged for all channels to obtain a spectrometer average response at the freezing point.

Signal at 800 nm during the freeze plateau

Traceability chain for spectrometer radiometric calibration

The aim of this work was to look at how practically a fixed-point blackbody could be used to calibrate an array spectrometer.

Signal at all wavelengths at the centre of the freeze plateau

Array spectrometer
A highly sensitive, mini photodiode array instrument manufactured by Hamamatsu was used in this work. The instrument contains 2048 pixel elements and is made of back-thinned silicon photodiode array that cover the spectral range from 208 nm to 1078 nm. This instrument was specially selected from a set of other array spectrometers to suit the requirements of a novel calibration technique for satellitederived Earth Observation data, using a model helicopter. Prior to calibration, the spectrometer was thoroughly evaluated for all possible factors that may affect its accuracy such as stray light, non-linearity, environmental conditions and dark signal noise. Light is guided into the spectrometer using a multimode fibre with two SMA terminals. The field-of-view (FOV) of the spectrometer is adjusted for the application using a collimating lens of small focal length.

Chromatic aberration
One of the major issues that should be considered in this calibration system is the expected chromatic aberration from using the imaging lens, for a fixed lens-furnace distance, what this means is that for longer wavelengths the spectrometer receives light from a focus further into the furnace. This can mean that at some wavelengths vignetting occurs; that the full beam of light observed by the fibre lens comes not just from the fixed-point cavity, but also from the front of the fixed-point cell. From simple geometric optics calculations and known values for the refractive index at different wavelengths, we determined that with a lens-fibre distance of 1683 mm, there was no vignetting for wavelengths shorter than 850 nm and only minor partial vignetting at longer wavelengths. In practice, it is likely that there is some vignetting at shorter wavelengths as well due to other lens aberrations. A uniformity scan of the copper point blackbody with a filter radiometer has shown that the radiance is uniform within 1 % for diameters up to 6 mm (twice the cavity opening). This is because the front surface of the fixed-point cell is at a very similar temperature to the cavity itself during the freeze. Given that the vignetting is only partial and therefore most light still comes from within the cavity, and given that the small proportion of light that does not come from within the cavity is from a part of the furnace that is within 1 % of the radiance of the cavity, the effect of vignetting over this wavelength range was considered minimal. However, in order to understand the effect in more detail, measurements were also made at two other lens-fibre optic distances. In one position (1607 mm) there was partial vignetting at all wavelengths. At the other position (1731 mm) there was partial vignetting at short wavelengths (<550 nm) and not at longer ones. The results showed that the signal level increased at all wavelengths when the spectrometer fibre head is placed at the closer position, yet with less sensitivity at higher wavelengths. This signal also encountered a decrease by nearly the same amount when it was moved to the back position. The results show that within 1 % the system is insensitive to the distance.

Spectrometer sensitivity to lens-fibre distance

Input optics for system

Calibration Concept
Calibration was performed using a copper fixed-point blackbody as it gave a suitable radiance level for the spectral region of interest (500 nm to 1000 nm). Because of the size of the source, and the field-of-view of the spectrometer, it was necessary to introduce an additional lens to focus light into the spectrometer.

Uncertainty budget
Component Repeatability Blackbody radiance Lens transmittance Vignetting, chromatic aberration, distance Stray light correction Temperature and linearity Combined uncertainty (expanded) Uncertainty 0.35 % 0.04 % - 0.09 % (wavelength sensitive) 0.04 % 0.50 % - 0.35 % (wavelength sensitive) Negligible once corrected Negligible once corrected 1.4 % (550 nm) 0.8 % (1000 nm)

Summary
This paper presents a novel calibration approach of photodiode array spectrometers in spectral radiance mode using a fixed-point blackbody. The calibration system proposed is simple, using only an imaging lens and a fixed-point blackbody. The technique has been shown to be practical, although for the highest accuracy measurements care must be taken to account for chromatic aberration in the imaging lens and to understand any sensitivity to distance. For the highest accuracy work, further tests would be required to minimise these sensitivities. However, even at the level of this current work, the uncertainty associated with this calibration is considerably better than 1.4 % (at k=2), and therefore the method is competitive with using more traditional tungsten lamp-based radiance sources. For those laboratories with access to fixedpoint blackbodies, this approach may be valuable.

Calibration set-up

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