Related papers: Astrophotonics: a new era for astronomical instrum…
Research activities during the last decade have shown the strong potential of photonic devices to greatly simplify ground based and space borne astronomical instruments and to improve their performance. We focus specifically on the…
While tunable filters are a recent development in night time astronomy, they have long been used in other physical sciences, e.g. solar physics, remote sensing and underwater communications. With their ability to tune precisely to a given…
Using photonic devices, we developed a new approach to traditional spectroscopy where the spectral cross-correlation with a template spectrum can be done entirely on-device. By creating photonic devices with a carefully designed, modulated…
The determination of photospheric abundances in late-type stars from spectroscopic observations is a well-established field, built on solid theoretical foundations. Improving those foundations to refine the accuracy of the inferred…
A photonic spectrograph can be much smaller than a conventional spectrograph with the same resolving power. Individual devices can be integrated with optical fibres to improve the multiplex gain in astronomical spectroscopy. Although…
The application of photonics to astronomy offers major advantages in the area of highly-multiplexed spectroscopy, especially when applied to extremely large telescopes. These include the suppression of the near-infrared night-sky spectrum…
Optical fibres have already played a huge part in ground based astronomical instrumentation, however, with the revolution in photonics currently taking place new fibre technologies and integrated optical devices are likely to have a…
The answers to fundamental science questions in astrophysics, ranging from the history of the expansion of the universe to the sizes of nearby stars, hinge on our ability to make precise measurements of diverse astronomical objects. As our…
Quantum metaphotonics has emerged as a cutting-edge subfield of meta-optics employing subwavelength resonators and their planar structures such as metasurfaces to generate, manipulate, and detect quantum states of light. It holds a great…
Observational astrophysics uses sophisticated technology to collect and measure electromagnetic and other radiation from beyond the Earth. Modern observatories produce large, complex datasets and extracting the maximum possible information…
Due to its location and climate, Antarctica offers unique conditions for long-period observations across a broad wavelength regime, where important diagnostic lines for molecules and ions can be found, that are essential to understand the…
One of the essential prerequisites for detection of Earth-like extra-solar planets or direct measurements of the cosmological expansion is the accurate and precise wavelength calibration of astronomical spectrometers. It has already been…
Large ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics (AO) systems have ushered in a new era of high-resolution infrared photometry and astrometry. Relative astrometric accuracies of <0.2 mas have already been demonstrated from…
In the last two decades, optical vortices carried by twisted light wavefronts have attracted a great deal of interest, providing not only new physical insights into light-matter interactions, but also a transformative platform for boosting…
The space-time correlations of streams of photons can provide fundamentally new channels of information about the Universe. Today's astronomical observations essentially measure certain amplitude coherence functions produced by a source.…
The next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes (ELT), with diameters up to 39 meters, will start opera- tion in the next decade and promises new challenges in the development of instruments. The growing field of astrophotonics (the use…
Extreme adaptive optics systems are now in operation across the globe. These systems, capable of high order wavefront correction, deliver Strehl ratios of 90% in the near-infrared. Originally intended for the direct imaging of exoplanets,…
Optical fibers have altered astronomical instrument design by allowing for a complex, often large instrument to be mounted in a remote and stable location with respect to the telescope. The fibers also enable the possibility to rearrange…
Photonic lanterns (PLs) are tapered waveguides that gradually transition from a multi-mode fiber geometry to a bundle of single-mode fibers. In astronomical applications, PLs can efficiently couple multi-mode telescope light into a…
One promising application of photonics to astronomical instrumentation is the miniaturization of near-infrared (NIR) spectrometers for large ground- and space-based astronomical telescopes. Here we present new results from our effort to…