Related papers: Beating the classical limit: A diffraction-limited…
As telescopes get larger, the size of a seeing-limited spectrograph for a given resolving power becomes larger also, and for ELTs the size will be so great that high resolution instruments of simple design will be infeasible. Solutions…
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…
There are numerous advantages to exploiting diffraction-limited instrumentation at astronomical observatories, which include smaller footprints, less mechanical and thermal instabilities and high levels of performance. To realize such…
The spectral resolution of a dispersive spectrograph is dependent on the width of the entrance slit. This means that astronomical spectrographs trade-off throughput with spectral resolving power. Recently, optical guided-wave transitions…
In recent years, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on achieving the diffraction limit with large aperture telescopes. For a well matched focal-plane instrument, the diffraction limit provides the highest possible angular resolution…
We report on the development of a compact (volume $\approx$ 100\:cm$^3$), multimode diffraction-limited Raman spectrograph and probe designed to be compact as possible. The spectrograph uses `off the shelf' optics, a custom 3D-printed…
The coupling of large telescopes to astronomical instruments has historically been challenging due to the tension between instrument throughput and stability. Light from the telescope can either be injected wholesale into the instrument,…
Resolving fine details of astronomical objects provides critical insights into their underlying physical processes. This drives in part the desire to construct ever-larger telescopes and interferometer arrays and to observe at shorter…
Optical spectroscopy is a fundamental tool in numerous areas of science and technology. Much effort has focused on miniaturizing spectrometers, but thus far at the cost of high spectral resolution and broad operating range. Here, we…
Classical, interferometric, optical lithography is diffraction limited to writing features of a size lambda/2 or greater, where lambda is the optical wavelength. Using nonclassical photon number states, entangled N at a time, we show that…
In an attempt to develop a streamlined astrophotonic instrument, we demonstrate the realization of an all-photonic device capable of both multimode to single mode conversion and spectral dispersion on an 8-m class telescope with efficient…
The development of optical fibers has revolutionized telecommunications by enabling long-distance broad-band transmission with minimal loss. In turn, the ubiquity of high-quality low-cost fibers enabled a number of additional applications,…
Photonic lanterns are an important enabling technology for astrophotonics with a wide range of potential applications including fibre Bragg grating OH suppression, integrated photonic spectrographs and fibre scramblers for high resolution…
A new instrument for spot profile analysis of electron diffraction - SPA-LEED - has been set up. The instrument works either with a transparent phosphor screen for visual inspection of the pattern or in its main mode with a channeltron for…
Laser speckle, the granular intensity pattern arising from random optical interference, provides a high-dimensional encoding of spectral information that can be exploited for precision metrology. Speckle-based spectrometers have advanced…
In traditional seeing-limited observations the spectrograph aperture scales with telescope aperture, driving sizes and costs to enormous proportions. We propose a new solution to the seeing-limited spectrograph problem. A massively…
We present the results of our work on developing fully integrated devices (photonic dicers) for reformatting multimode light to a diffraction limited pseudo-slit. These devices can be used to couple a seeing-limited telescope…
Direct imaging instruments have the spatial resolution to resolve exoplanets from their host star. This enables direct characterization of the exoplanets atmosphere, but most direct imaging instruments do not have spectrographs with high…
A general-purpose all-fiber spectrometer is demonstrated to overcome the trade-off between spectral resolution and bandwidth. By integrating a wavelength division multiplexer with five multimode optical fibers, we have achieved 100 nm…
Optical photothermal microscopy is a powerful, emerging method that overcomes the diffraction limit in infrared hyperspectral imaging by utilizing a visible probe laser beam to detect local temperature-induced modulation at the visible…