Etendue 2026-10-06
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 iii Paper 338 2 b ii Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
The fundamental angular floor is the diffraction limit of a telescope, of order . The ideal diffraction grating has , whereas its slit-limited resolving power has . Requiring givesThe coefficient depends on the adopted line-resolution and aperture conventions. Below this scale, a narrower spaxel oversamples the same spatial mode rather than creating a new independently resolved element. Equivalently a spatial optical mode occupies etendue of order .
There is also an engineering floor before arbitrary shrinkage: the optical camera focal length, photodetector size and support clearances do not shrink, while the number of photodetectors increases as . Thus the shrinking-beam model's constant combined optical camera volume is eventually overtaken by fixed per-camera overheads. For fixed brightness, smaller spaxels receive fewer photons, so read noise and photon shot noise can constrain useful sampling before the formal optical floor. Diffraction limits independent spatial information; fixed photodetector and mechanical dimensions limit practical volume reduction.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2017 iii Paper 338 2 b i Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-06
The number of spaxels is . To obtain definite scaling exponents, keep the spectral resolving power, wavelength interval, diffraction grating angles and groove spacing, input focal ratio, and photodetector sampling of a spectral resolution element fixed. A fixed photodetector then accommodates a fixed number of spectra, so (rounded up in an actual instrument). The corresponding etendue per spaxel scales as . Angular ratios are independent of whether both angles are in arcseconds; optical invariant equations use radians.
Write for the collimated beam diameter. The diffraction grating result gives . A fixed collimator focal ratio gives . With a fixed image width in photodetector detector pixels, the invariant and instead imply is constant: the optical camera focal ratio increases as .
In a simple on-axis beam-envelope model, each collimator and collimated disperser space has area proportional to and length proportional to , whereas the optical camera cone has area proportional to and fixed length. HenceThe constants include and fixed design parameters. At fixed field size, the combined collimator and diffraction grating volumes scale as , while the combined optical camera beam-cone volume scales as .
These are integral-field spectrograph volume scaling laws for the shrinking beam, not a claim that the whole apparatus can shrink without a floor. A photodetector of fixed transverse size needs space for its field: an optical camera envelope interpolating between optical pupil width and photodetector width has volume proportional to , rather than just . Replication then adds terms scaling as and , which can grow as the spaxels shrink. Other field clearances and mechanical margins also change the asymptote. Without the fixed spectral/design assumptions above, the information in the question does not determine unique physical-volume exponents. The role of fixed photodetector size and beam spread is discussed in Allington-Smith's instrument scaling model.