Related papers: Modal noise in an integrated photonic lantern fed …
Recently, we demonstrated how an astrophotonic light reformatting device, based on a multicore fibre photonic lantern and a three-dimensional waveguide component, can be used to efficiently reformat the point spread function of a telescope…
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…
We present a new concept of an integrated optics component capable of measuring the complex amplitudes of the modes at the tip of a multimode waveguide. The device uses a photonic lantern to split the optical power carried by an $N$-modes…
This paper reports on the modal noise characterisation of a hybrid reformatter. The device consists of a multicore-fibre photonic lantern and an ultrafast laser-inscribed slit reformatter. It operates around 1550 nm and supports 92 modes.…
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…
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 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…
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,…
Fibre modal noise occurs in high spectral resolution, high signal-to-noise applications. It imposes fundamental limits on the photometric accuracy of state-of-the-art fibre-spectrograph systems. In order to maximize the performance of…
While photonic lanterns efficiently and uniquely map a set of input modes to single-mode outputs (or vice versa), the optical mode transfer matrix of any particular fabricated device cannot be constrained at the design stage due to…
The mid-infrared spectral window is essential for molecular fingerprinting and atmospheric sensing, yet unlocking its full potential is currently constrained by a fundamental instrumental trade-off: existing systems cannot simultaneously…
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…
A fiber-based photonic lantern can couple an array of single-mode optical fibers to the guided modes of a multimode fiber, with the mapping between the single-mode fibers and guided modes fully described by a complex-valued transfer matrix.…
The integration density of photonic integrated circuits has been limited by light coupling between waveguides. Traditional approaches to layout the waveguide with high density are based on refractive index engineering to suppress the light…
We propose and demonstrate that a conventional multimode fiber can function as a high resolution, low loss spectrometer. The proposed spectrometer consists only of the fiber and a camera that images the speckle pattern generated by…
We demonstrate the use of an optimized 5 core photonic lantern (PL) to simultaneously measure tip/tilt errors at the telescope focal plane, while also providing the input to an instrument. By replacing a single mode (SM) fiber with the PL…
Using a photonic reformatter to eliminate the effects of conventional modal noise could greatly improve the stability of a high resolution spectrograph. However the regimes where this advantage becomes clear are not yet defined. Here we…
We propose a universal approach for modeling complex integrated photonic resonators based on the scattering matrix method. By dividing devices into basic elements including directional cou-plers and connecting waveguides, our approach can…
One of the problems of producing instruments for Extremely Large Telescopes is that their size (and hence cost) scales rapidly with telescope aperture. To try to break this relation alternative new technologies have been proposed, such as…
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…