Related papers: Integrated photonic building blocks for next-gener…
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…
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,…
We demonstrate a new approach to classical fiber-fed spectroscopy. Our method is to use a photonic lantern that converts an arbitrary (e.g. incoherent) input beam into N diffraction-limited outputs. For the highest throughput, the number of…
We report on the fabrication and characterization of composite multimode waveguide structures that consist of a stack of single-mode waveguides fabricated by ultrafast laser inscription. We explore 2 types of composite structures; those…
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…
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 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…
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…
The burgeoning field of astrophotonics explores the interface between astronomy and photonics. Important applications include photonic OH suppression at near-infrared wavelengths, and integrated photonic spectroscopy. These new photonic…
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…
The study of integrating photonic devices into astronomical instruments is the primary focus of astrophotonics. The growth in this area of study is relatively recent. Research related to astronomical spectroscopic phenomena has received a…
Photonic technologies offer numerous advantages for astronomical instruments such as spectrographs and interferometers owing to their small footprints and diverse range of functionalities. Operating at the diffraction-limit, it is…
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…
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…
Over the past two decades, photonics have been developed as technological solutions for astronomical instrumentation for, e.g., near-infrared spectroscopy and long baseline interferometry. With increasing instrument capabilities, large…
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…
Photonic lanterns allow for a low-loss transformation of a multimode waveguide into a discrete number of single-mode waveguides and vice versa, thus, enabling the use of single-mode photonic technologies in multimode systems. In this…
Starlight corrupted by atmospheric turbulence cannot couple efficiently into astronomical instruments based on integrated optics as they require light of high spatial coherence to couple into their single-mode waveguides. Low-order adaptive…
Image slicing is a powerful technique in astronomy. It allows the instrument designer to reduce the slit width of the spectrograph, increasing spectral resolving power whilst retaining throughput. Conventionally this is done using bulk…
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…