CfAI Head of Optical Design gives award winning talk at the SPIE Astronomical Telescopes & Instrumentation Conference in Japan

An image slicer is an optical system composed of arrays of mirrors in miniature with different orientations used to reorganise a 2D field of view into one or more slits to illuminate a spectrograph obtaining the spectra of all points simultaneously.

Ariadna’s talk presented the state-of-the-art of glass and metallic image slicers for two projects: MINOS (Manufacturing of Image slicer NOvel technology for Space) and LUCES (Looking Up image slicers optimum Capabilities in the EUV for Space), in collaboration with UCL.

MINOS’s glass slicer demonstrator was manufactured by Bertin Technologies. It has exceptionally low surface roughness and the slicer mirrors are only 70 microns wide – or about the width of a human hair. The LUCES project produced slicer demonstrators on metal rather than glass with different widths and different materials, including aluminium, nickel plated, brass, copper and nickel silver. These were manufactured at the CfAI and include the thinnest slicer mirror width ever produced at 15 microns (about the size of a typical bacterium).

These developments in the Extreme Ultra-Violet (EUV) spectral range, which sits between ultraviolet and X-ray radiation, are proposed for the next generation of solar space missions and, in particular, for an EUV Integral Field Spectrograph called SISA (Spectral Imaging of the Solar Atmosphere) (Aerospace | Free Full-Text | Spectral Imager of the Solar Atmosphere: The First Extreme-Ultraviolet Solar Integral Field Spectrograph Using Slicers (mdpi.com)). The resolution and efficiency offered by these new image slicers is essential for solar physics.

The list of all awardees in the different prize categories can be found here: SPIE ASTRO 2024 | 「天体望遠鏡と観測装置」に関する国際光工学会（SPIE）主催のシンポジウム (nao.ac.jp)