Optical characterization of high-resolution optical nanospectrometers for networked sensing systems

Nowadays, nanosensor arrays have a great potential in industrial process control, automatic identification or medical applications. Regarding the medical field, the possibility to detect characteristic biomarkers or environmental toxins in living spaces in a transcutaneous, non-invasive and user-friendly way will open new markets. Furthermore, by combination of an array of miniaturized spectroscopic sensors a fast and reliable overview-scan of the most important parameters will be enabled. In this paper, we describe the fabrication of a miniaturized spectrometer (nanospectrometer), the measurement setup used for its characterization and reveal measurement results. In this work, a microscope spectrometer is used to measure transmission spectra of nanosensor arrays in visible spectral range. This system can provide many advantages in terms of high accuracy, measurement speed and the ability of measuring microstructure sizes. We focus on the spectral resolution as key results of our optical characterization. We have obtained good agreement between theoretical model calculations and two different experimental set-ups: our fast and flexible microscope spectrometer and the Lambda 900 reference spectrometer which calibrates and verifies the flexible system. The agreement with the simulations provides a proof of concept of our novel nanospectrometer.