D.G. MacLachlan
Efficient photonic reformatting of celestial light for diffraction-limited spectroscopy
MacLachlan, D.G.; Harris, R.J.; Gris-Sánchez, I.; Morris, T.J.; Choudhury, D.; Gendron, E.; Basden, A.G.; Spaleniak, I.; Arriola, A.; Birks, T.A.; Allington-Smith, J.R.; Thomson, R.R.
Authors
R.J. Harris
I. Gris-Sánchez
Professor Timothy Morris t.j.morris@durham.ac.uk
Professor
D. Choudhury
E. Gendron
Dr Alastair Basden a.g.basden@durham.ac.uk
Hpc Technical Manager
I. Spaleniak
A. Arriola
T.A. Birks
J.R. Allington-Smith
R.R. Thomson
Abstract
The spectral resolution of a dispersive astronomical spectrograph is limited by the trade-off between throughput and the width of the entrance slit. Photonic guided wave transitions have been proposed as a route to bypass this trade-off, by enabling the efficient reformatting of incoherent seeing-limited light collected by the telescope into a linear array of single modes: a pseudo-slit which is highly multimode in one axis but diffraction-limited in the dispersion axis of the spectrograph. It is anticipated that the size of a single-object spectrograph fed with light in this manner would be essentially independent of the telescope aperture size. A further anticipated benefit is that such spectrographs would be free of ‘modal noise’, a phenomenon that occurs in high-resolution multimode fibre-fed spectrographs due to the coherent nature of the telescope point spread function (PSF). We seek to address these aspects by integrating a multicore fibre photonic lantern with an ultrafast laser inscribed three-dimensional waveguide interconnect to spatially reformat the modes within the PSF into a diffraction-limited pseudo-slit. Using the CANARY adaptive optics (AO) demonstrator on the William Herschel Telescope, and 1530 ± 80 nm stellar light, the device exhibits a transmission of 47–53 per cent depending upon the mode of AO correction applied. We also show the advantage of using AO to couple light into such a device by sampling only the core of the CANARY PSF. This result underscores the possibility that a fully optimized guided-wave device can be used with AO to provide efficient spectroscopy at high spectral resolution.
Citation
MacLachlan, D., Harris, R., Gris-Sánchez, I., Morris, T., Choudhury, D., Gendron, E., …Thomson, R. (2017). Efficient photonic reformatting of celestial light for diffraction-limited spectroscopy. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 464(4), 4950-4957. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw2558
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Oct 6, 2016 |
Online Publication Date | Oct 6, 2016 |
Publication Date | Feb 1, 2017 |
Deposit Date | Jul 26, 2017 |
Publicly Available Date | Jul 26, 2017 |
Journal | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society |
Print ISSN | 0035-8711 |
Electronic ISSN | 1365-2966 |
Publisher | Royal Astronomical Society |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 464 |
Issue | 4 |
Pages | 4950-4957 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw2558 |
Files
Published Journal Article
(1.8 Mb)
PDF
Copyright Statement
This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society ©: 2016 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
You might also like
Development of integrated mode reformatting components for diffraction-limited spectroscopy
(2015)
Journal Article
Applications of Integrated Photonic Spectrographs in astronomy
(2013)
Journal Article
Modelling complex phenomena in optical fibres
(2012)
Conference Proceeding
A new method for correcting fibre barycentre displacements in high resolution spectroscopy
(2012)
Conference Proceeding
Simulation of complex phenomena in optical fibres
(2012)
Journal Article