An astrophotonics platform for Lick Observatory: testing Adaptive Mode Extraction with photonic lanterns
An astrophotonics platform for Lick Observatory: testing Adaptive Mode Extraction with photonic lanterns
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利克天文台的天体光子学平台：使用光子灯测试自适应模式提取
DOI：
10.1117/12.2630591
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发表时间：
2022
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Jensen-Clem, Rebecca M.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Demartino, Matthew;Bundy, Kevin A.;Schmidt, Holger;Kupke, Renate;MacDonald, Nick;Gates, Elinor;Rees, Jon;Lynam, Paul;Hinz, Philip M.;Jensen-Clem, Rebecca M.
天体光子技术，特别是大规模生产的“单片光谱仪”，为大幅降低天文光谱仪的每光谱成本提供了一条令人兴奋的途径。这项技术有朝一日可能会对基于光纤的仪器进行重大的多路复用升级，并激发新的设施，能够以单光纤和IFU格式同时收集10万个光谱。在这里，我们报道了利克天文台的一个新的天体光子学平台，用于对这些技术进行空中测试。我们最初的重点是有效地将望远镜光耦合到光子器件中的问题，光子器件通常被优化为使用单模，即衍射受限的光。虽然光子灯可以在给定多模输入的情况下提供多个单模输出，但这里我们引入了自适应模式提取(AME)的概念，它使用第二个参考灯笼来选择最亮的一个或多个瞬时模式注入到光子器件中。类似于“散斑光谱学”，这种技术有可能通过空间过滤掉天空背景来提高微弱信号源的信噪比。我们已经在Shane望远镜的AO系统后面部署了我们的测试平台，并证明它满足我们计划的AME天空测试的要求，即能够将来自附近两颗恒星(2英寸以内)的经过AO校正的光耦合到两个动态定位的灯笼中，具有足够的吞吐量(<；40%)和图像质量(0.15英寸)。
Astrophotonic technologies, specifically mass-produced “spectrometers-on-a-chip,” offer an exciting path toward dramatically reducing the cost-per-spectrum of astronomical spectrographs. This technology could one day enable significant multiplexing upgrades to fiber-based instruments and inspire new facilities capable of collecting 100,000 simultaneous spectra in both single-fiber and IFU formats. Here, we report on a new astrophotonics platform at Lick Observatory for on-sky testing of such technologies. Our initial focus is on the problem of efficiently coupling telescope light into photonic devices, which are typically optimized to work with a single mode, i.e., with diffraction-limited light. While photonic lanterns can deliver multiple single-mode outputs given multi-modal input, here we introduce the concept of Adaptive Mode Extraction (AME), which uses a second, reference lantern to select the brightest instantaneous mode or modes for injection into photonic devices. Analogous to “speckle spectroscopy,” this technique has the potential to increase the signal-to-noise ratio for faint sources by spatially filtering out the sky background. We have deployed our testing platform behind the AO system at the Shane Telescope and demonstrate that it meets requirements for our planned on-sky tests of AME, namely the ability to couple AO-corrected light from two nearby stars (within 2′′) into two dynamically-positioned lanterns, with adequate throughput (<40%) and image quality (0.15′′).