Integrated micro-spectrographs in the era of Extremely Large Telescopes

Séminaire IPAG de Nicolas Blind (MPE), jeudi 31 janvier 2013 à 11h00, IPAG seminar room

The next generation of Extremely Large Telescopes, with diameter up to 39 meters, is planned to begin operation on the horizon 2020 and promises new challenges in the development of instruments. Indeed, as the instrument size increases in proportion of the telescope diameter, the cost of future instruments could be as much as a single 10-m class telescope. The growing field of astrophotonics (the use of photonic technologies for astronomy) could partly solve this problem by allowing mass production of fully integrated instruments combining various optical functions (e.g. OH-suppression and spectroscopy for the study of high-redshift galaxies), promising then to save both size and money.

In this talk, I focus on the developments of micro-spectrographs and on their potential for ELTs. I present first the different technologies of micro-spectrographs that have been identified up to now. Then, I compare the performance of the different possible concepts, including current bulk solutions. To assess which spectrometer concepts are the most promising and would deserve particular developments, I finally re-analyse a few science cases of the E-ELT in this astrophotonics framework.