Design and development of five-channel interference filter polychromator for SST-1 Thomson scattering system

Five-channel interference filter polychromator is designed and fabricated for measuring electron temperature and density from Thomson scattered spectrum of SST-1 tokamak plasma. The instrument is designed for measuring electron temperature in the range of 20 eV–3 keV and electron density of 1018–1019 m−3. Optical ray tracing software, Zemax is used for simulating and optimizing the optical design. Each polychromator is a stand-alone unit with field programmable gate array (FPGA) based controller unit for easy operation, monitoring of the temperature variation of the instrument and communicating to a central personal computer (PC). The control unit also protects the avalanche photo diode (APD) detectors from damage due to high current flow, sets the slow channel gain and switches on the biasing power supply. Characteristics of the present polychromator design are relatively high signal throughput and variable bandwidth selection of filters combined with a stable, low cost and relatively simple configuration. Filter selection, arrangement order of filters, statistical error analysis, mechanical and optical design and estimation of electron temperature and density are discussed in this article. The fabricated filter polychromator is tested for its image quality, optical alignment, and integrated performance.