American Spectrometers

Smartphone Spectrometers

Smartphones are playing an increasing role in the sciences, owing to the ubiquitous proliferation of these devices, their relatively low cost, increasing processing power and their suitability for integrated data acquisition and processing in a 'lab in a phone' capacity. There is furthermore the potential to deploy these units as nodes within Internet of Things architectures, enabling massive n...

CMOS Charged Particle Spectrometers

Integrated circuits, manufactured in CMOS technology, have been developed as diffusion-based charged particle spectrometers for space applications. Current designs are single-chip spectrometers capable of uniquely identifying and counting electrons and heavy ions. A four-chip spectrometer designed to count protons and heavy ions was flown on the Clementine spacecraft. The spectrometer proton da...

Spectrometers for Heterodyne Detection

Heterodyne spectrometers split naturally into two sections: a front-end that shifts the input band to lower frequency and amplifies it, and a back-end which analyzes and detects the signal. This brief review discusses requirements for spectrometer back-ends at submillimeter and far-infrared wavelengths, describes basic spectrometer technology, and indicates some of the important areas for futur...

Transmission grating based spectrometers

Semiconductor Particle Spectrometers

Following almost ten years of incubation, solid state radiation detectors have, in recent years, achieved increasing emphasis and use in low energy nuclear physics.1-4 Such detectors depend on the production of free-charge carriers in crystals by the interaction of incident particles with bound electrons. Solid-state detectors are analogues of the well-known gaseous ionization chamber. In an io...