Poster + Paper
18 July 2024 Photonic lantern testing on Lick Observatory’s 3m Shane Telescope
Matthew C. DeMartino, Kevin Bundy, Stephen Eikenberry, Rodrigo Amezcua-Correa, Stephanos Yerolatsitis, Sergio Leon-Saval, Jordan Diaz, Aditya Sengupta, Rebecca Jensen-Clem, Phil Hinz
Author Affiliations +
Conference Poster
Abstract
Astrophotonics, with its potential for creating low-cost, mass-producible devices, offers a path to dramatically reduce the cost of future astronomical spectrographs. However, coupling the light from large astronomical telescopes into small, photonic chip-based instruments remains a challenge. Photonic lanterns offer a potential solution. Photonic lanterns predictably decompose the inherently multimode light from a ground-based telescope into a series of single-mode outputs, thus eliminating the need for exotic optical elements or extreme AO to achieve high efficiency. We have built a custom assembly for the AO system at Lick Observatory’s 3m Shane Telescope to test photonic lantern behavior on-sky. Here we report on multiple nights of observations over the past year using a lantern with a design wavelength of 1550 nm. Our data reveals the lantern’s basic performance over a 605–1000 nm band and its time domain response to turbulent PSFs with AO correction residuals. These measurements are important for determining the efficacy of future efforts to preferentially select or combine output modes in “real-world” scenarios across scientifically useful bandwidths.
(2024) Published by SPIE. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Matthew C. DeMartino, Kevin Bundy, Stephen Eikenberry, Rodrigo Amezcua-Correa, Stephanos Yerolatsitis, Sergio Leon-Saval, Jordan Diaz, Aditya Sengupta, Rebecca Jensen-Clem, and Phil Hinz "Photonic lantern testing on Lick Observatory’s 3m Shane Telescope", Proc. SPIE 13096, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy X, 13096A1 (18 July 2024); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.3020309
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KEYWORDS
Astrophotonics

Adaptive optics

Single mode fibers

Telescopes

Point spread functions

Observatories

Beam splitters

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