Research Areas - (2) Photonic Lantern and OH-Suppression Fibre Instrumentation

Full path: Astronomy / Astrophysics > Astronomical Instrumentation > Optical / IR Astronomical Instrumentation > Astrophotonics / Photonic Spectrographs > Photonic Lantern and OH-Suppression Fibre Instrumentation

Joss Bland-Hawthorn 🔗
University of Sydney 🔗
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Department(s)/lab(s): School of Physics / Sydney Institute for Astronomy | Sydney Astrophotonic Instrumentation Laboratory (SAIL) @ USyd
Summary:

Bland-Hawthorn founded the field of astrophotonics and directs SAIL. The core idea is to replace bulk-optic astronomical instruments with single-mode photonic devices: the photonic lantern (an adiabatic multimode-to-single-mode transition that lets a seeing-limited telescope beam be fed into single-mode circuitry), fibre Bragg grating OH-suppression filters that notch out the ~100 atmospheric emission lines swamping the near-infrared, integral-field hexabundles, photonic combs and integrated spectrographs. He also leads Galactic archaeology work (GALAH, S5). Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — SAIL is where a quantum-sensing physicist's instincts about single-mode optics, photon budgets and noise floors transfer most directly into astronomy — the entire discipline exists because photon-starved measurements need front-end optics designed at the fundamental limit, exactly as with pT/sqrt(Hz) magnetometry. Excellent pivot target; large group, deep fabrication resources.

Sergio Leon-Saval 🔗
University of Sydney 🔗
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Department(s)/lab(s): School of Physics / Sydney Institute for Astronomy | Sydney Astrophotonic Instrumentation Laboratory (SAIL) @ USyd
Summary:

Leon-Saval co-invented the photonic lantern and is the fibre-device engineer of the SAIL programme. His group designs, draws and characterises multicore fibres, mode-selective lanterns, OH-suppression fibre Bragg gratings and hexabundles, and increasingly applies the same devices outside astronomy — in telecommunications space-division multiplexing and in medical endoscopy and imaging through fibre. The unifying technical problem is coupling a spatially-incoherent, aberrated beam into single-mode circuitry without losing photons. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — photonic lanterns are directly applicable to quantum sensing readout: the same device that feeds a seeing-limited telescope beam into a single-mode spectrograph can feed fluorescence from a scattering biological sample into a single-mode quantum-limited detector, preserving the photon budget that a pT/sqrt(Hz) NV measurement depends on.