Description
Multi-Core Integral Field Unit (MCIFU) brings the advantages of the existing and expanding photonics field to the astronomical instrumentation, such as versatility of manufacturing and small footprint. The science case includes diffraction limited spectroscopy of close companions (~ 50 mas away from the host star) at a spectral resolving power (R) of 5000, in the Y, J and H band. MCIFU will be an add-on for the extreme Adaptive Optics instrument (MagAO-X) of the Magellan Clay Telescope, enabling differential imaging at the Paschen betta line of atomic Hydrogen. The core of the MCIFU is the fiber link, and its design is shaped around a Multi-Core Fiber (MCF) with about 200 cores, transferring 1 arcsec field of view of the MagAO-X focal plane’s image to the spectrograph, located few meters from the telescope. A multi lens array with the help of two photon polymerization 3D printing will efficiently couple the light to the MCF on its input end. On the other end of the MCF, an ultra-fast laser inscribed reformatter reformats the hexagonal arrangement of the MCF cores into a pseudo slit, which serves the input to the spectrograph. Among the requirements, we are especially careful with crosstalk between cores of the MCF, and also about throughput of the reformatter chip. The design phase is now in progress, with fabrication, lab tests and integration to follow. We aim for the first light of MCIFU v2 in 2026.
