Related papers: Laue and Fresnel lenses
At present the ground-based Very High Energy (VHE) gamma-ray astronomy is racing to complete construction of a number of modern gamma-ray detectors, i.e. CANGAROO III, MAGIC, H.E.S.S., and VERITAS. They should be fully operational in a…
The Fresnel Diffractive Array Imager (FDAI) is based on a new optical concept for space telescopes, developed at Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Plan\'etologie (IRAP), Toulouse, France. For the visible and near-infrared it has…
Diffraction limits the behaviour of light in optical systems and sets the smallest achievable line width at half the wavelength. With a novel subwavelength plasmonic lens to reduce the diffraction via an asymmetry and to generate and…
Laser-plasma technology promises a drastic reduction of the size of high energy electron accelerators. It could make free electron lasers available to a broad scientific community, and push further the limits of electron accelerators for…
Understanding the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy is one of the most pressing issues in cosmology and fundamental physics. The purpose of the DUNE (Dark UNiverse Explorer) mission is to study these two cosmological components with…
High-energy photons are a powerful probe for astrophysics and for fundamental physics in extreme conditions. During the recent years, our knowledge of the most violent phenomena in the Universe has impressively progressed thanks to the…
The Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) includes photons with wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared, which are effective at attenuating gamma rays with energy above ~10 GeV during propagation from sources at cosmological distances. This…
For the first time, with the Laue project, bent crystals are being used for focusing photons in the 80-300 keV energy range. The advantage is their high reflectivity and better Point Spread Function with respect to the mosaic flat crystals.…
Ultrafast lasers are ideal tools to process transparent materials because they spatially confine the deposition of laser energy within the material's bulk via nonlinear photoionization processes. Nonlinear propagation and filamentation were…
Weak gravitational lensing has become an important tool to study the properties of dark matter halos around galaxies, thanks to the advent of large panoramic cameras on 4m class telescopes. This area of research has been developing rapidly…
We describe the instrument concept of a high angular resolution telescope dedicated to the sub-GeV (from $\gtrsim$10 MeV to $\gtrsim$1 GeV) gamma-ray photon detection. This mission, named PANGU (PAir-productioN Gamma-ray Unit), has been…
Gravitationally lensed Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) offer critical advantages over other lensed sources. They can be detected via continuously operating detectors covering most of the sky. They offer extremely high time resolution to determine…
Pulsars seen at gamma-ray energies offer insight into particle acceleration to very high energies, along with information about the geometry and interaction processes in the magnetospheres of these rotating neutron stars. During the next…
The design of spaceborne high-energy (E>100 MeV) gamma-ray detectors depends on two principal factors: (1) the basic physics of detecting and measuring the properties of the gamma rays; and (2) the constraints of operating such a detector…
Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool to detect compact matter on very different mass scales. Of particular importance is the fact that lensing is sensitive to both luminous and dark matter alike. Depending on the mass scale, all lensing…
Strong gravitationally lensed supernovae (glSNe) are a powerful probe to obtain a measure of the expansion rate of the Universe, but they are also extremely rare. To date, only two glSNe with multiple images strongly lensed by galaxies have…
We study the fundamental limits of detection for astrophysical observations in the far infrared. Understanding these fundamental limits is critical to the planning and analysis of experiments in this region. We specifically characterize the…
The millimeter/sub-millimeter (mm/sub-mm) sky remains a rich but under-explored frontier for transient and variable phenomena. A wide-field, high-sensitivity instrument with a large aperture and degree-scale field of view would open this…
Very high energy (VHE, E > 30 GeV) gamma-rays are absorbed via interaction with low-energy photons from the extragalactic background light (EBL) if the involved photon energies are above the threshold for electron-positron pair creation.…
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…