Low-Cost Spectrometer for the Modern Physics Laboratory

Spectroscopy has become an important tool due to wide-reaching applications, where emphasis is placed on high precision that often comes with a cost. We built a budget-friendly spectrometer and implemented it in an advanced undergraduate laboratory course (Modern Physics) to measure atomic spectra. Overall, the spectrometer has a resolving power of ~0.50 nm per pixel with a 5.0 megapixel webcam.