Focal ratio 2026-10-06
The focal ratio is the focal length divided by the entrance aperture diameter. It controls the cone angle of a paraxial focused beam.
With fixed spectral resolving power, wavelength interval, diffraction grating geometry, photodetector sampling and collimator focal ratio, a beam diameter scales as the spaxel width , but the optical camera focal length stays fixed. A simple on-axis beam-envelope model therefore gives collimator and disperser volumes proportional to and optical camera volume proportional to . With a fixed number of spaxels per photodetector, replication multiplies these volumes by . A fixed photodetector field adds transverse clearances and changes the small- limit; these exponents are not universal mechanical-volume laws.
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. Hence
The 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.