Design and proto-typing of integral field units for the ELT-PCS test bench spectrograph

摘要

One of the highest scientific priorities for ESO's Extremely Large Telescope is imaging and characterising Earth-like planets around Sun-like stars, requiring contrast ratios of 10~(-9) only achievable through a combination of extreme adaptive optics, advanced coronagraphy, and data post-processing. The dedicated planetary instrument ELT-PCS uses an integral field spectrograph to simultaneously obtain a homogeneous set of spectra over a two-dimensional field on the sky. Here we present the design and early results from prototyping activities for a lenslet-array and an image-slicer based IFU that are being studied in the context of the ELT-PCS R&D. In particular for the image slicer we investigate classical polishing techniques, like used for SINFONI and SWIFT, and diamond machining.