Rubidium transitions as wavelength reference for astronomical Doppler spectrographs
Abstract
Precise wavelength calibration is a critical issue for high-resolution spectroscopic observations. The ideal calibration source should be able to provide a very stable and dense grid of evenly distributed spectral lines of constant intensity. A new method which satisfies all mentioned conditions has been developed by our group. The approach is to actively measure the exact position of a single spectral line of a Fabry-Perot etalon with very high precision with a wavelength-tuneable laser and compare it to an extremely stable wavelength standard. The ideal choice of standard is the D2 absorption line of Rubidium, which has been used as an optical frequency standard for decades. With this technique, the problem of stable wavelength calibration of spectrographs becomes a problem of how reliably we can measure and anchor one etalon line to the Rb transition. In this work we present our self-built module for Rb saturated absorption spectroscopy and discuss its stability.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2003.08205,
title = {Rubidium transitions as wavelength reference for astronomical Doppler spectrographs},
author = {Dmytro Rogozin and Tobias Feger and Christian Schwab and Yulia V. Gurevich and Gert Raskin and David W. Coutts and Julian Stuermer and Andreas Seifahrt and Thorsten Fuehrer and Thomas Legero and Hans van Winckel and Sam Halverson and Andreas Quirrenbach},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.08205},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
SPIE ANZCOP conference, Melbourne 2019