Diffraction gratings: aberrations and applications

Diffraction grating is an optical instrument, which is advantageously used for scientific research in spectroscopy and spatial filtering. It has many other applications in science and technology such as wavelength selectors for tuneable lasers, selective surfaces for solar energy, masks for photolithography, beam sampling mirrors for high power lasers, spectrometers in extreme UV and X-ray regions for space optics, metrology, phase measuring interferometry and pattern recognition, etc. Although the holographic gratings have many advantages over the ruled gratings but they have not yet eliminated completely the classical ruled gratings as the ruled gratings have their own importance in many applications. Therefore, in this article, both the ruled and holographic gratings will be discussed, in particular, their focusing properties, aberrations, and their applications.