Compound prism design principles, II: triplet and Janssen prisms.

Continuing the work of the first paper in this series [Appl. Opt. 50, 4998-5011 (2011)], we extend our design methods to compound prisms composed of three independent elements. The increased degrees of freedom of these asymmetric prisms allow designers to achieve greatly improved dispersion linearity. They also, however, require a more careful tailoring of the merit function to achieve design targets, and so we present several new operands for manipulating the compound prisms' design algorithm. We show that with asymmetric triplet prisms, one can linearize the angular dispersion such that the spectral sampling rate varies by no more than 4% across the entire visible spectral range. Doing this, however, requires large prisms and causes beam compression. By adding a beam compression penalty to the merit function, we show that one can compromise between dispersion linearity and beam compression in order to produce practical systems. For prisms that do not deviate the beam, we show that Janssen prisms provide a form that maintains the degrees of freedom of the triplet and that are capable of up to 32° of dispersion across the visible spectral range. Finally, in order to showcase some of the design flexibility of three-element prisms, we also show how to design for higher-order spectral dispersion to create a two-dimensional spectrum.