Optical fiber systems for the BigBOSS instrument

摘要

We describe the fiber optics systems for use in BigBOSS, a proposed massively parallel multi-object spectrographfor the Kitt Peak Mayall 4-m telescope that will measure baryon acoustic oscillations to explore dark energy.BigBOSS will include 5,000 optical fibers each precisely actuator-positioned to collect an astronomical target’s fluxat the telescope prime-focus. The fibers are to be routed 40m through the telescope facility to feed ten visible-bandimaging spectrographs. We report on our fiber component development and performance measurement program.Results include the numerical modeling of focal ratio degradation (FRD), observations of actual fibers’ collimatedand converging beam FRD, and observations of FRD from different types of fiber terminations, mechanicalconnectors, and fusion-splice connections.© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.