Abstract

Astrophotonics is the application of photonic principles to astronomical instrumentation, in order to reduce cost, size, weight and complexity while increasing performance. In astrophotonics the "photonic lantern" (PL) [1-4] is a remarkable photonic device which efficiently couples light between a multimode (MM) optical fibre and a set of degenerate single modes (SMs) which are guided by the cores of either individual SM fibres [1-3] or a multicore optical fibre [4]. If the SMs produced by the PL are arranged into a linear array [5], the PL facilitates the efficient collection of light from a telescope using a MM fibre and the low-loss reformatting of this light into a near diffraction limited input (in one axis) for a spectrometer [6].

© 2011 IEEE