Everything You Want to know About Collimating Lens from Thorlabs or Elsewhere

Collimating lenses are optical lenses that help in making the light entering into the spectrophotometer parallel. With a collimating lens from Thorlabs or elsewhere, one can control the field of view, spatial resolution of their setup, collection angles for sampling and illumination.

Why are they important in the first place?

One of the prime reasons for use of the collimating lens is high divergence result of a laser diode. It is made up of aspheric lenses, they do not pose spherical aberration.

Collimating lenses are usually picked as and when a collimated beam requirement is between one and five millimetres.

Where are they used and how are they used?

Collimating lens is placed inside a collimator. An Optical collimator is utilized for calibration, testing and measurement. In one of the types of the collimator, patterns are projected into infinity. When a target is kept in the focal plane of a collimator, the uniform target seems extremely near. This phenomenon makes it eligible for use in devices generally used for training purposes like flight simulators.

How to adjust focus on a collimating lens?

To accomplish this, the collimated light should first enter a sample, pass it and then transit to the spectrometer on the other side. As a rule of fact, a collimating lens from Thorlab and alike bind to the fiber coming from the light source and then from this fiber to the spectrometer.

Which collimating lens should be used?

There are two types - single or achromatic collimating lens. One has the freedom to pick a collimating lens of his choice with specifications of one’s choice – focal length or wavelength. Pick up yours!

Summing up

Collimating lenses by Thorlabs and others have revolutionised the world of spectrophotometry.