Absolute linear-in-k spectrometer designs enabled by freeform optics.

Linear-in-wavenumber, k, spectrometers have the merits of saving signal processing time and improving the sensitivity of spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) by avoiding post-k-interpolation. We report on an approach leveraging freeform optics to linearize spectrometers in k to achieve an extremely low residual k-nonlinearity in design. A freeform lens reduced the k-nonlinearity from 2.47% for a benchmark spectrometer to 2.79 × 10