The Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph (SAMI)
Abstract
We demonstrate a novel technology that combines the power of the multi-object spectrograph with the spatial multiplex advantage of an integral field spectrograph (IFS). The Sydney-AAO Multi-object IFS (SAMI) is a prototype wide-field system at the Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) that allows 13 imaging fibre bundles ("hexabundles") to be deployed over a 1-degree diameter field of view. Each hexabundle comprises 61 lightly-fused multimode fibres with reduced cladding and yields a 75 percent filling factor. Each fibre core diameter subtends 1.6 arcseconds on the sky and each hexabundle has a field of view of 15 arcseconds diameter. The fibres are fed to the flexible AAOmega double-beam spectrograph, which can be used at a range of spectral resolutions (R=lambda/delta(lambda) ~ 1700-13000) over the optical spectrum (3700-9500A). We present the first spectroscopic results obtained with SAMI for a sample of galaxies at z~0.05. We discuss the prospects of implementing hexabundles at a much higher multiplex over wider fields of view in order to carry out spatially--resolved spectroscopic surveys of 10^4 to 10^5 galaxies.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1112.3367,
title = {The Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph (SAMI)},
author = {Scott M. Croom and Jon S. Lawrence and Joss Bland-Hawthorn and Julia J. Bryant and Lisa Fogarty and Samuel Richards and Michael Goodwin and Tony Farrell and Stan Miziarski and Ron Heald and D. Heath Jones and Steve Lee and Matthew Colless and Sarah Brough and Andrew M. Hopkins and Amanda E. Bauer and Michael N. Birchall and Simon Ellis and Anthony Horton and Sergio Leon-Saval and Geraint Lewis and A. R. Lopez-Sanchez and Seong-Sik Min and Christopher Trinh and Holly Trowland},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1112.3367},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
24 pages, 16 figures. Accepted by MNRAS