Mechanically ruled aberration-corrected concave gratings.

Aberration-corrected concave gratings with curved and variable spacing grooves are ruled with a numerically controlled ruling engine. In the design of aberration-corrected concave gratings, mechanical methods allow more freedom to choose the amount of space variation than do holographic methods. A highly efficient visible-UV monochromator and a coma-type aberration-reduced Seya-Namioka monochromator have been designed and fabricated using mechanically ruled aberration-corrected concave gratings. The gratings can be used with VUV monochromators and spectrographs with improved image focusing properties.