A photonic crystal microspectrometer

We propose a microspectromer consisting of a photonic crystal mating directly to a detector array as shown in Figure 1(a). The photonic crystal in this case is a 3D opal structure that is an inhomogeneous quasi-periodic array of microcavities that cause spectral variation in the near field. Advantages of the photonic crystal filter compared to an array of thin film filters are: insensitivity to angle of incidence, ability to characterize large etendue sources, and spectral diversity as a function of position on a small scale less than 10 microns.