There exists a fundamental trade-off between the spectral resolution and the efficiency or throughput for all optical spectrometers. The primary factors affecting the spectral resolution and throughput of an optical spectrometer are the size of the entrance aperture and the optical power of the focusing element. So far, the collective optimization of the above mentioned has proven difficult. Here, we introduce the concept of high-throughput computational slits (HTCS), a numerical technique for improving both the effective spectral resolution and efficiency of a spectrometer. The proposed HTCS approach was experimentally validated using an optical spectrometer configured with a 200 mu m entrance aperture, test, and a 50 mu m entrance aperture control, demonstrating improvements in the spectral resolution of the spectrum by similar to 50% over the control spectral resolution and improvements in efficiency of >2 times over the efficiency of the largest entrance aperture used in this Letter, while producing highly accurate spectra. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America
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