Dept Colloquium: Pradip Gatkine, UCLA

Astronomical instruments on a chip - Getting ready for the next-generation telescopes

Speaker: Pradip Gatkine, UCLA

Abstract: Astrophotonics is the application of versatile photonic technologies to channel, manipulate, and disperse guided light from one or more telescopes to achieve scientific objectives in astronomy efficiently and cost-effectively. The photonic platform of guided light in fibers and waveguides has opened the doors to next-generation instrumentation for both ground- and space-based telescopes. Utilizing the photonic advantage is a promising approach to massively miniaturize the next generation of spectrographs. I will discuss some of our recent results from our efforts to design and fabricate high-throughput on-chip astrophotonic spectrographs. These devices are ideally suited for enabling exciting science cases, such as measuring exoplanet masses and characterizing exoplanet atmospheres. I will also discuss specific approaches to make this technology science-ready for the Extremely Large Telescope era.

Host: Dr. Sylvain Veilleux