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

未来的望远镜仪器能够同时收集和处理来自数千个微弱星系的光。这些工具将有助于对暗能量和暗物质的性质等问题进行变革性的深入了解。 研究人员代表了天文仪器制造商和工程团队之间的合作，这些团队专门研究在芯片上操纵光的新光波电路。这项技术令人兴奋，因为这种“光子”芯片体积小，重量轻，可以大规模生产，以目前成本的一小部分提供更强大的天文仪器。 研究人员建议构建和测试一种新的芯片，其性能可以调整。这使得它非常适合研究数千个小星系，最终目标是使用安装在望远镜上的此类芯片阵列首次揭示它们的暗物质含量。研究人员将把这项工作的主题编织成几个STEM参与工作，目标是服务不足的社区和从小学到大学生的年龄段。下一代光谱设施将需要能够有效地观察10亿个光谱。 这比今天可能的要大得多。 唯一可行的途径是通过利用集成光子技术将每频谱成本降低一个数量级。 该项目通过关注可以进行低阶自适应光学校正的宽视场范围，在高复用片上光谱仪方面取得了重要进展。研究人员将开发一种新的光谱可调芯片光谱仪，该光谱仪易于大规模生产，并提供非常适合可扩展封装的2D光谱图像。利用UCSC自适应光学实验室先进的天文测试设施，该提案将为近期光子仪器的概念设计提供信息，该仪器具有适度的成本，能够进行强大的矮星系暗物质调查。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

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.