Abstract :
In the new era of Extremely Large Telescopes (ELT's) currently under construction, challenging requirements drive spectrograph designs towards techniques that efficiently use a facility’s light feed. Operating in the single-mode close to the diffraction limit, reduces the footprint of the instrument compared to a conventional high resolving power spectrograph (e.g. CARMENES, HERMES) and mitigates problems and cost issues caused by the use of large optics. With adaptive optics (AO) we can provide diffraction-limited starlight to a spectrograph, which shrink down in size as we reduce the number of modes.
To couple AO and spectrographs, we explore the potential of astrophotonic devices such like photonic lanterns and photonic reformatters that can be used to replace the bulk optics of a spectrograph. This research evaluates the performance of such devices like Photonic Dicer and Hybrid reformatter using end-to-end simulations to approximate realistic on-sky conditions. Another application on the high resolution spectroscopy, is the use of 3D printed lenses on top of a 19-core multi-core fiber (MCF) operating in the near-infrared regime. This custom MCF feeds light from SCExAO to a single-mode spectrograph. Results show promising potential of astrophotonic components to be used on-sky over conventional optics in certain areas of astronomy.