Development of a bright polychromator for Thomson scattering measurements

A bright polychromator for compact, efficient YAG Thomson scattering measurement was designed on the basis of ray-tracing calculations. The optical input of the polychromator is a 2-mm-diameter optical fiber with a numerical aperture of 0.37. High refractive index glass lenses with monolayer anti-reflection coatings were used to reduce aberration effects and achieve good efficiency. A fast, low-noise detection system consisting of an avalanche photodiode and operational amplifiers was designed and tested using YAG laser pulses; the measured full width at half maximum (FWHM) of the laser pulse was 10 ns. The measured noise was dominated by the thermal noise of the input resistance R (= 470Ω) when the signal was low, and the shot noise became dominant when the number of detected photons was greater than about 500.