Method for accumulating high‐resolution optical spectra by repetitive photoelectric scanning

We describe a variable speed (20–1000 μm/s) photoelectric scanning method for high‐resolution optical spectra. The particular feature of our method is that we use an optical linear encoder and store the data from multiple scans in a multichannel analyzer. This results in significant improvement in signal‐to‐noise over single scans. Although commerically available vidicon tubes or image dissectors have the advantage of simultaneously recording the complete spectrum, our system has the advantage of high positional repeatability (1 μm) and is consequently suitable for high‐resolution spectroscopy.