Spectral Imager of the Solar Atmosphere: The First Extreme-Ultraviolet Solar Integral Field Spectrograph Using Slicers

Abstract

Particle acceleration, and the thermalisation of energetic particles, are fundamental processes across the universe. Whilst the Sun is an excellent object to study this phenomenon, since it is the most energetic particle accelerator in the Solar System, this phenomenon arises in many other astrophysical objects, such as active galactic nuclei, black holes, neutron stars, gamma ray bursts, solar and stellar coronae, accretion disks and planetary magnetospheres. Observations in the Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) are essential for these studies but can only be made from space. Current spectrographs operating in the EUV use an entrance slit and cover the required field of view using a scanning mechanism. This results in a relatively slow image cadence in the order of minutes to capture inherently rapid and transient processes, and/or in the spectrograph slit ‘missing the action’. The application of image slicers for EUV integral field spectrographs is therefore revolutionary. The development of this technology will enable the observations of EUV spectra from an entire 2D field of view in seconds, over two orders of magnitude faster than what is currently possible. The Spectral Imaging of the Solar Atmosphere (SISA) instrument is the first integral field spectrograph proposed for observations at ∼180 Å combining the image slicer technology and curved diffraction gratings in a highly efficient and compact layout, while providing important spectroscopic diagnostics for the characterisation of solar coronal and flare plasmas. SISA’s characteristics, main challenges, and the on-going activities to enable the image slicer technology for EUV applications are presented in this paper.