The photonic lantern

Birks, T. A.; Gris-Sánchez, Itandehui; Yerolatsitis, Stephanos; Leon-Saval, Sergio G.; Thomson, Robert R.

doi:10.1364/aop.7.000107

Cited by 298 publications

(187 citation statements)

References 158 publications

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“…Each MCF core was 9 μm in diameter with a numerical aperture of 0.11. The adiabatic transition for the lantern was made by tapering the MCF in an F-doped capillary, as described in Birks et al (2012Birks et al ( , 2015, to form a multimode input port with a core of cross-sectional diameter 43 μm and a numerical aperture of 0.22 (Fig. 1c).…”

Section: H Y B R I D R E F O R M At T E R D E S I G Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The idea behind the PIMMS concept is to use a guided-wave transition, known as a 'photonic lantern' (Leon-Saval et al 2005;Bland-Hawthorn et al 2011;Thomson et al 2011;Spaleniak et al 2013;Birks et al 2015), to efficiently couple the multimode telescope PSF to an array of single modes. These single modes can then be rearranged (or reformatted) into a linear array to form a pseudo-slit that acts as a diffraction-limited single-mode input (along the dispersion axis) to a spectrograph.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Efficient photonic reformatting of celestial light for diffraction-limited spectroscopy

MacLachlan

Harris

Gris-Sánchez

et al. 2016

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

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The spectral resolution of a dispersive astronomical spectrograph is limited by the trade-off between throughput and the width of the entrance slit. Photonic guided-wave transitions have been proposed as a route to bypass this trade-off, by enabling the efficient reformatting of incoherent seeing-limited light collected by the telescope into a linear array of single modes: a pseudo-slit which is highly multimode in one axis but diffraction-limited in the dispersion axis of the spectrograph. It is anticipated that the size of a single-object spectrograph fed with light in this manner would be essentially independent of the telescope aperture size. A further anticipated benefit is that such spectrographs would be free of 'modal noise', a phenomenon that occurs in high-resolution multimode fibre-fed spectrographs due to the coherent nature of the telescope point-spread-function (PSF). We address these aspects by integrating a multicore fibre photonic lantern with an ultrafast laser inscribed three-dimensional waveguide interconnect to spatially reformat the modes within the PSF into a diffraction-limited pseudo-slit. Using the CANARY adaptive optics (AO) demonstrator on the William Herschel Telescope, and 1530 ± 80 nm stellar light, the device is found to exhibit a transmission of 47 -53 % depending upon the mode of AO correction applied. We also show the advantage of using AO to couple light into such a device by sampling only the core of the CANARY PSF. This result underscores the possibility that a fully-optimised guided-wave device can be used with AO to provide efficient spectroscopy at high spectral resolution.

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Section: H Y B R I D R E F O R M At T E R D E S I G Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient photonic reformatting of celestial light for diffraction-limited spectroscopy

MacLachlan

Harris

Gris-Sánchez

et al. 2016

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

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“…The concept of photonic lantern was originally conceived in the field of astrophotonics to couple the light between a multimode single-core fiber and individual single-mode single-core fibers [61]. In recent years, this device has been extensively developed to inject (extract) light to (from) optical fibers in space-division multiplexing transmissions (i.e., multiplexing techniques that establish multiple spatially distinguishable data paths using multimode singlecore fibers [62][63][64][65][66] and MCFs [67]), as well as for other applications [68]. The photonic lanterns considered in these previous works (based on classical step-index and gradualindex profiles) support homogeneous supermodes, i.e., supermodes generated from the linear combination of degenerate LP modes with the same azimuthal and radial order.…”

Section: A Unbroken Susymentioning

confidence: 99%

Supersymmetric Transformations in Optical Fibers

2018

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Supersymmetry (SUSY) has recently emerged as a tool to design unique optical structures with degenerate spectra. Here, we study several fundamental aspects and variants of one-dimensional SUSY in axially symmetric optical media, including their basic spectral features and the conditions for degeneracy breaking. Surprisingly, we find that the SUSY degeneracy theorem is partially (totally) violated in optical systems connected by isospectral (broken) SUSY transformations due to a degradation of the paraxial approximation. In addition, we show that isospectral constructions provide a dimension-independent design control over the group delay in SUSY fibers. Moreover, we find that the studied unbroken and isospectral SUSY transformations allow us to generate refractive-index superpartners with an extremely large phase-matching bandwidth spanning the S þ C þ L optical bands. These singular features define a class of optical fibers with a number of potential applications. To illustrate this, we numerically demonstrate the possibility of building photonic lanterns supporting broadband heterogeneous supermodes with large effective area, a broadband all-fiber true-mode (de)multiplexer requiring no mode conversion, and different mode-filtering, mode-conversion, and pulse-shaping devices. Finally, we discuss the possibility of extrapolating our results to acoustics and quantum mechanics.

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“…Photonic lanterns are a device that allows the efficient conversion from a multi-mode fibre to an array of singlemode fibres, [33][34][35][36] and vice versa (see the excellent recent review by Birks et al 37 for full details of their operation, performance and construction). The principle of their operation is shown in Figure 4.…”

Section: Photonic Lanternsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speciality optical fibres for astronomy

Ellis

Bland-Hawthorn

2015

Micro-Structured and Specialty Optical Fibres IV

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Astrophotonics is a rapidly developing area of research which applies photonic technology to astronomical instrumentation. Such technology has the capability of significantly improving the sensitivity, calibration and stability of astronomical instruments, or indeed providing novel capabilities which are not possible using classical optics. We review the development and application of speciality fibres for astronomy, including multi-mode to single-mode converters, notch filters and frequency combs.In particular we focus on our development of instruments designed to filter atmospheric emission lines to enable much deeper spectroscopic observations in the near-infrared. These instruments employ two novel photonic technologies. First, we have developed complex aperiodic fibre Bragg gratings which filter over 100 irregularly spaced wavelengths in a single device, covering a bandwidth of over 200 nm. However, astronomical instruments require highly multi-mode fibres to enable sufficient coupling into the fibre, since atmospheric turbulence heavily distorts the wavefront. But photonic technologies such as fibre Bragg gratings, require single mode fibres. This problem is solved by the photonic lantern, which enables efficient coupling from a multi-mode fibre to an array of single-mode fibres and vice versa.We present the results of laboratory tests of these technologies and of on-sky experiments made using the first instruments to deploy these technologies on a telescope. These tests show that the fibre Bragg gratings suppress the night sky background by a factor of 9. Current instruments are limited by thermal and detector emission. Planned instruments should improved the background suppression even further, by optimising the design of the spectrograph for the properties of the photonic components.Finally we review ongoing research in astrophotonics, including multi-moded multicore fibre Bragg gratings, which enable multiple gratings to be written into the same device simultaneously, femtosecond direct-write photonic lanterns and Bragg gratings, and complex notch filters and frequency combs using microring resonators, and plans for future astrophotonic instrumentation.

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The photonic lantern

Cited by 298 publications

References 158 publications

Efficient photonic reformatting of celestial light for diffraction-limited spectroscopy

Efficient photonic reformatting of celestial light for diffraction-limited spectroscopy

Supersymmetric Transformations in Optical Fibers

Speciality optical fibres for astronomy

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