Development of integrated photonic-dicers for reformatting the point-spread-function of a telescope

David G. MacLachlan; Robert Harris; Debaditya Choudhury; Alexander Arriola; Graeme Brown; Jeremy Allington-Smith; Robert R. Thomson

doi:10.1117/12.2055904

18 July 2014 Development of integrated photonic-dicers for reformatting the point-spread-function of a telescope

David G. MacLachlan, Robert Harris, Debaditya Choudhury, Alexander Arriola, Graeme Brown, Jeremy Allington-Smith, Robert R. Thomson

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9151, Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation; 91511W (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2055904
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2014, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

Spectroscopy is a technique of paramount importance to astronomy, as it enables the chemical composition, distances and velocities of celestial objects to be determined. As the diameter of a ground-based telescope increases, the pointspread- function (PSF) becomes increasingly degraded due to atmospheric seeing. A degraded PSF requires a larger spectrograph slit-width for efficient coupling and current spectrographs for large telescopes are already on the metre scale. This presents numerous issues in terms of manufacturability, cost and stability. As proposed in 2010 by Bland-Hawthorn et al, one approach which may help to improve spectrograph stability is a guided wave transition, known as a “photonic-lantern”. These devices enable the low-loss reformatting of a multimode PSF into a diffraction-limited source (in one direction). This pseudo-slit can then be used as the input to a traditional spectrograph operating at the diffraction limit. In essence, this approach may enable the use of diffractionlimited spectrographs on large telescopes without an unacceptable reduction in throughput. We have recently demonstrated that ultrafast laser inscription can be used to realize “integrated” photoniclanterns, by directly writing three-dimensional optical waveguide structures inside a glass substrate. This paper presents our work on developing ultrafast laser inscribed devices capable of reformatting a multimode telescope PSF into a diffraction-limited slit.

Citation Download Citation

David G. MacLachlan, Robert Harris, Debaditya Choudhury, Alexander Arriola, Graeme Brown, Jeremy Allington-Smith, and Robert R. Thomson "Development of integrated photonic-dicers for reformatting the point-spread-function of a telescope", Proc. SPIE 9151, Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation, 91511W (18 July 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2055904

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