Related papers: A Sodium laser guide star coupling efficiency meas…
SAXO+ is a proposed upgrade to SAXO, the AO system of the SPHERE instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope. It will improve the capabilities of the instrument for the detection and characterization of young giant planets. It includes a…
Many spectacular polarimetric images have been obtained in recent years with adaptive optics (AO) instruments at large telescopes because they profit significantly from the high spatial resolution. This paper summarizes some basic…
Pulsed UV lasers can provide useful "testbeams" for observatories that use optical detectors, especially fluorescence detectors, to measure high energy cosmic-rays. The light observed by the detector is proportional to the energy of the…
To obtain accurate mass measurements for cold planets discovered by microlensing, it is usually necessary to combine light curve modeling with at least two lens mass-distance relations. Often, a constraint on the Einstein ring radius…
We have created a new autonomous laser-guide-star adaptive-optics (AO) instrument on the 60-inch (1.5-m) telescope at Palomar Observatory called Robo-AO. The instrument enables diffraction-limited resolution observing in the visible and…
Context. Modern space telescopes are currently providing high-precision light curves for a large fraction of the sky, such that many new variable stars are being discovered. However, some stars have periodic variability with periods of…
We numerically and experimentally demonstrate efficient light couplers between topological slow light waveguides in valley photonic crystals (VPhCs) and wire waveguides. By numerical simulations, we obtained a high coupling efficiency of…
Capacitive-coupled Low-Gain Avalanche Diode (AC-LGAD) sensors are being developed for high-energy particle physics experiments as a detector which provides fast time information with fine spatial resolution. This paper describes…
We are using a laser pointer as a light source, and metersticks as an optical branch and the screen for wave optics experiments. It is shown the setup for measurements of wavelength of laser light and rating radial spacing of the CD,…
Large area surveys will dominate the next decade of astronomy, and the main limitation to science will be the thorough followup and characterization of their extremely numerous discoveries. The deployment of robotic laser adaptive optics on…
We report on high angular resolution near-infrared (NIR) observations of three galaxy clusters at different redshifts using adaptive optics (AO). In the case of the barred spiral \object{UGC 1347} in Abell 262 we presented the first AO…
The Max-Planck institutes for astronomy (MPIA) and for extraterrestrial physics (MPE) run an adaptive optics (AO) system with a laser guide star at the 3.5 m telescope on Calar Alto, Spain. This system, called ALFA, produces now scientific…
Laser guide stars created by Rayleigh scattering provide a reasonable means to monitor atmospheric wavefront distortions for real-time correction by adaptive optics systems. Because of the $\lambda^{-4}$ wavelength dependence of Rayleigh…
We report on the first observation of cosmologically distant field galaxies with an high order Adaptive Optics (AO) system on an 8-10 meter class telescope. Two galaxies were observed at 1.6 microns at an angular resolution as high as 50…
Ground-based solar observations are severely affected by Earth's turbulent atmosphere. As a consequence, observed image quality and prevailing seeing conditions are closely related. Partial correction of image degradation is nowadays…
This paper reports on the excitation of surface plasmons on gold-coated nanofibre tips by side-illumination with a laser beam and the coupling of the surface plasmons to the optical fiber. The measurements show a strong dependence of the…
In the last few years, new Adaptive Optics [AO] techniques have emerged to answer new astronomical challenges: Ground-Layer AO [GLAO] and Multi-Conjugate AO [MCAO] to access a wider Field of View [FoV], Multi-Object AO [MOAO] for the…
This work characterizes a phenomenon in direct laser written directional couplers where the splitting ratio for output light is dependent on the input polarization state. In general, for laser written waveguides, different coupling…
The creation of nanoscale lasers that operate above a coherent threshold is a challenging problem. We propose a way to circumvent this issue using systems in which a strong coupling regime is achieved between the light and the active…
Long-exposure spectro-polarimetry in the near-infrared is a preferred method to measure the magnetic field and other physical properties of solar prominences. In the past, it has been very difficult to observe prominences in this way with…