A small actively-controlled high-resolution spectrograph based on off-the-shelf components

© 2021. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific. The original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/We present the design and testing of a prototype in-plane echelle spectrograph based on an actively controlled fiber-fed double-pass design. This system aims to be small and efficient with the minimum number of optical surfaces—currently a collimator/camera lens, cross-dispersing prism, grating and a reflector to send light to the detector. It is built from catalog optical components and has dimensions of approximately 20 × 30 cm. It works in the optical regime with a resolution of >70,000. The spectrograph is fed by a bifurcated fiber with one fiber to a telescope and the other used to provide simultaneous Thorium Argon light illumination for wavelength calibration. The positions of the arc lines on the detector are processed in real time and commercial auto-guiding software is used to treat the positions of the arc lines as guide stars. The guiding software sends any required adjustments to mechanical piezo-electric actuators which move the mirror sending light to the camera removing any drift in the position of the arc lines. The current configuration using an sCMOS detector provides a precision of 3.5 milli-pixels equivalent to 4 ms −1 in a standard laboratory environment.Peer reviewe

Mitigating Modal Noise in Multimode Circular Fibres by Optical Agitation using a Galvanometer

© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Modal noise appears due to the non-uniform and unstable distribution of light intensity among the finite number of modes in multimode fibres. It is an important limiting factor in measuring radial velocity precisely by fibre-fed high-resolution spectrographs. The problem can become particularly severe as the fibre's core become smaller and the number of modes that can propagate reduces. Thus, mitigating modal noise in relatively small core fibres still remains a challenge. We present here a novel technique to suppress modal noise. Two movable mirrors in the form of a galvanometer reimage the mode-pattern of an input fibre to an output fibre. The mixing of modes coupled to the output fibre can be controlled by the movement of mirrors applying two sinusoidal signals through a voltage generator. We test the technique for four multimode circular fibres: 10 and 50 micron step-index, 50 micron graded-index, and a combination of 50 micron graded-index and 5:1 tapered fibres (GI50t). We present the results of mode suppression both in terms of the direct image of the output fibre and spectrum of white light obtained with the high-resolution spectrograph. We found that the galvanometer mitigated modal noise in all the tested fibres, but was most useful for smaller core fibres. However, there is a trade-off between the modal noise reduction and light-loss. The GI50t provides the best result with about 60% mitigation of modal noise at a cost of about 5% output light-loss. Our solution is easy to use and can be implemented in fibre-fed spectrographs.Peer reviewe