Collaborative Research: A Tunable Astrophotonic Spectrometer with Adaptive Faint-Source Extraction

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Future telescope instruments capable of collecting and processing light from thousands of faint galaxies simultaneously are planned. Such instruments would enable transformative insights, including on the nature of dark energy and dark matter. The investigators represent a collaboration between astronomical instrument builders and engineering groups specializing in new lightwave circuits that manipulate light on a chip. This technology is exciting because such “photonic” chips are small and light-weight and can be mass-produced to provide more powerful astronomical instruments at a fraction of their current cost. The investigators propose to build and test a novel chip whose performance can be tuned. This makes it ideally suited to studying thousands of small galaxies, with the eventual aim of revealing their dark matter content for the first time using an array of such chips mounted on a telescope. The investigators will weave the themes of this work into several STEM engagement efforts targeting underserved communities and age levels from elementary school to undergraduates.The next-generation of spectroscopic facilities will need to be capable of observing 1 billion spectra efficiently. This is many factors greater than what is possible today. The only viable path is an order-of-magnitude reduction in the cost-per-spectrum afforded by utilizing integrated photonic technologies. This project makes important strides towards high-multiplex, on-chip spectrometers by focusing on the wide-field regime where low-order adaptive optics corrections are possible. The investigators will develop a new spectrally-tunable chip-based spectrometer that is easily mass-produced and delivers 2D spectral images well suited to scalable packaging. Taking advantage of advanced astronomical testing facilities at UCSC’s Lab for Adaptive Optics, this proposal will inform the conceptual design of a near-term photonic instrument with modest cost capable of conducting a powerful dwarf galaxy dark matter survey.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.