Coupling starlight into single-mode photonic crystal fiber using a field lens.

We determine the coupling characteristics of a large mode area (LMA) photonic crystal, single-mode fiber when fed with an on-axis field lens used to place an image of the telescope exit pupil at the fiber input. The maximum field of view is found to be approximately the same as that of feeding the fiber directly with the telescope PSF in the image plane. However, the field lens feed can be used to provide a flat, maximised coupling response over the entire visible-NIR which is not possible using either the highly wavelength dependent direct feed coupling to the LMA fiber or the attenuation spectrum limited step index fiber cases

Development of integrated mode reformatting components for diffraction-limited spectroscopy

We present the results of our work on developing fully integrated devices (photonic dicers) for reformatting multimode light to a diffraction limited pseudo-slit. These devices can be used to couple a seeing limited telescope point spread function to a spectrograph operating at the diffraction limit, thus potentially enabling compact, high-resolution spectrographs that are free of modal noise

Optical design of optical switches for diverse field spectroscopy

Diverse field spectroscopy is a new concept in which any part of a field can be optically captured and send to the entrance slit of a spectrograph. It is more general than integral field spectroscopy, multi-object spectroscopy and even multi-integral-field spectroscopy which combine the two as in the KMOS instrument. In diverse field spectroscopy, point sources and extended sources are simultaneously optically captured in an optimal way that fully use the spectrograph for only the regions of interest; as opposed to multi-integral-field spectroscopy where rectangular or square fields are fully captured, the capturing mechanism will follow the complex shapes of the sources removing any useless field which can then be use for other sources instead or permit to observe larger sources. Optical switches can be programmed to transmit any subset of the spatial elements of a field to the spectrograph. We present the different optical designs of switches that we made, some using micromirrors arrays, others small lenses. We also present conceptual designs of low cost projects for Échelle spectrographs as the SALT HRS and for the FMOS spectrographs on SUBARU. A critical aspect of the designs is to minimize the cost so that the switches can be mass-produced while maintaining high optical performances. A general discussion will be made of the relation between the total cost of the switch system plus spectrograph and the multiplex advantage with respect to an integral-field spectrograph giving the same performances