This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will commercialize the holographic multi-spectral filter technology developed during the SBIR phase I project. The objective of this project will be the industrial fabrication of holographic multi-spectral filters by using the methods developed and demonstrated during the phase I SBIR research. There is a strong scientific and public push in astronomy to look deeper into the universe to discover and observe fascinating phenomena such as the birth of stars and exo-planets. In observations of celestial bodies from ground telescopes, the signal is faint and surrounded with unwanted optical noise from the atmosphere. The hydroxyl (OH) radicals present in the atmosphere emit light in hundreds of narrow lines that dominate the inter-line sky emission by many orders of magnitude. The multi-spectral rejection filter demonstrated in phase I discriminates the narrow spectral features of the OH emission lines from the atmosphere which increases the image sharpness by increasing the signal to noise ratio.
The narrow band grating filter technology is a core platform that has a scientific and economic impact on ground-based astronomy as well as in laser diode systems. To date $3.8 Billion has been spent deploying and maintaining the Hubble Telescope. An estimated $2.2 Billion is required to see it to its final scheduled retiring date of 2010. It is believed that the introduction of the these multi-line filters combined in some cases with adaptive optics, can boost the performance of ground based telescopes so that they can approach the performance of space telescopes at a price more than 1000 times lower.
