From The University of California-Santa Cruz: “Collaboration between engineering and astrophysics will develop cutting-edge spectrometers-on-a-chip”
From The University of California-Santa Cruz
9.28.22
Emily Cerf
ecerf@ucsc.edu
The Shane AO camera at Lick Observatory with the researchers’ photonics testing platform attached.
A few years ago, UC Santa Cruz Assistant Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kevin Bundy became intrigued by the potential of photonic devices, which can detect and manipulate light on small scales, to miniaturize the methods used to capture information about objects in the night sky.
Excited by the possibility of this astrophotonics technology, he reached out to Holger Schmidt, distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering and an expert in the field of photonics, to open a conversation about the potential for collaboration.
Now, the two researchers have won an NSF grant that will allow them to pursue this emerging technology of making spectrometers on a chip – tiny devices for separating and measuring light at ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths to to study the properties of objects in the sky, including their composition and distance. They believe that this technology can not only enable advances in astronomy when used as part of telescope instrumentation, but can be leveraged for a wide variety of applications across fields such as chemical analysis, environmental monitoring, and biosensing.
“There’s a lot of technology now that can be brought to bear in taking these spectrometers – these color analyzers – and shrinking them down from about the size of a car to something much more compact, and in some senses more powerful,” Schmidt said.
Spectrometers-on-a-chip have the potential to be very impactful in that sizing down the technology to split and detect wavelengths of light can mean many can be packed on to one single telescope, making it possible to one day collect spectra from tens or even hundreds of thousands of celestial sources simultaneously.
Their small size also means they can be produced at a lower cost, transported more easily, and integrated with other components to create a device with a wide range of functionality – all of the benefits we typically associate with the miniaturization of tech.
“The general benefit is just the ability to collect a lot more information from the sky a lot more powerfully and cheaply,” Bundy said. “You can imagine putting these devices on a satellite or on a balloon, because they would be so much smaller and lighter.”
But there are two main challenges the researchers must address before their spectrometers-on-a-chip can be successfully implemented in telescopes and potential other applications.
The first is the issue of optimizing the chip itself, which includes making them more efficient, making sure they can record and provide the right information about the light they detect, learning how to integrate them so they can pack multiple chips side-by-side on one device. The researchers need to operationalize the chips so that they can become a robust component of a larger instrument, such as one mounted on a telescope, and not just a device that is studied in the lab.
The other main challenge is to couple the light received through the telescope into the miniature spectrometers. Because of Earth’s atmosphere, ground-based telescopes never produce a perfectly stable image of a star, but instead the star is always wobbling slightly in the image. This effect is not conducive to photonic spectrometers, which work best when the light they receive is pure and undisturbed. This requires the scientists to think innovatively about how to best feed light from the telescopes to the spectrometers.
“That challenge is the reason why this is an interesting problem, and it’s one of the reasons we don’t have this technology on existing telescopes,” Bundy said.
Bundy believes there is growing momentum for this area of research, and that it can be of great benefit to ongoing efforts within the astronomy community. For example, a current project at the Rubin Observatory will capture images of and catalog billions of objects in the night sky. Current technology only allows scientists to capture the spectra of 5,000 objects at a time, making a project to follow up on the images captured and measure spectra at this scale nearly impossible. But Bundy hopes that the new devices the UCSC researchers develop will make this affordable and feasible.
“For cosmology and galaxy formation, I don’t see another way to continue our forward momentum in terms of better instruments in the 10 to 20 year timescale,” Bundy said. “In about ten years, there has to be some technological transformation, or we’re kind of stuck. I think there’s going to be growing interest in making this work.”
Schmidt’s lab will focus on designing and testing the miniature spectrometers, with fabrication of the devices spearheaded by collaborators at Brigham Young University. Bundy’s group, led by graduate student Matt DeMartino, will establish the requirements for the device in order to optimize and test its performance.
“I think this will be the first step in hopefully a broader set of programs and projects that combine photonics and astronomy,” Schmidt said.
The researchers will work to integrate their miniaturized spectrometers onto the telescope at Lick Observatory, which is managed by UC Observatories and located close to Santa Cruz. In the near future, the team hopes to test their devices on the telescope there, meaning the three-meter, nearly 80-year old device can play an important role for developing cutting-edge astronomical instrumentation.
The grant will also fund several STEM outreach programs taken on by the researchers. The researchers will run experiments related to photonics as part of the Seeds Spoon Science program, which teaches local school children and their families science through gardening. They will also participate in the UC LEADS and CAMP programs which sponsor promising students from underrepresented groups, and continue successful outreach programs at local elementary and middle schools.
See the full article here .
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The University of California-Santa Cruz, opened in 1965 and grew, one college at a time, to its current (2008-09) enrollment of more than 16,000 students. Undergraduates pursue more than 60 majors supervised by divisional deans of humanities, physical & biological sciences, social sciences, and arts. Graduate students work toward graduate certificates, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees in more than 30 academic fields under the supervision of the divisional and graduate deans. The dean of the Jack Baskin School of Engineering oversees the campus’s undergraduate and graduate engineering programs.
UCSC is the home base for the Lick Observatory.
UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Since 1888 Mt Hamilton, in San Jose, California, Altitude 1,283 m (4,209 ft)
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence expands at Lick Observatory
New instrument scans the sky for pulses of infrared light
March 23, 2015
By Hilary Lebow
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.
“Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the University of Toronto’s Dunlap Institute for Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by UC Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.
Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.
The NIROSETI instrument saw first light on the Nickel 1-meter Telescope at Lick Observatory on March 15, 2015. (Photo by Laurie Hatch.)
Astronomers are expanding the search for extraterrestrial intelligence into a new realm with detectors tuned to infrared light at UC’s Lick Observatory. A new instrument, called NIROSETI, will soon scour the sky for messages from other worlds.
Alumna Shelley Wright, now an assistant professor of physics at UC San Diego, discusses the dichroic filter of the NIROSETI instrument, developed at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA) and brought to The University of California-San Diego and installed at the UC Santa Cruz Lick Observatory Nickel Telescope (Photo by Laurie Hatch). “Infrared light would be an excellent means of interstellar communication,” said Shelley Wright, an assistant professor of physics at The University of California-San Diego who led the development of the new instrument while at the U Toronto Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics (CA).
NIROSETI team from left to right Rem Stone UCO Lick Observatory Dan Werthimer, UC Berkeley; Jérôme Maire, U Toronto; Shelley Wright, The University of California-San Diego Patrick Dorval, U Toronto; Richard Treffers, Starman Systems. (Image by Laurie Hatch).
Wright worked on an earlier SETI project at Lick Observatory as a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate, when she built an optical instrument designed by University of California-Berkeley researchers. The infrared project takes advantage of new technology not available for that first optical search.
Infrared light would be a good way for extraterrestrials to get our attention here on Earth, since pulses from a powerful infrared laser could outshine a star, if only for a billionth of a second. Interstellar gas and dust is almost transparent to near infrared, so these signals can be seen from great distances. It also takes less energy to send information using infrared signals than with visible light.
Frank Drake, professor emeritus of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz and director emeritus of the SETI Institute, said there are several additional advantages to a search in the infrared realm.
Frank Drake with his Drake Equation. Credit Frank Drake.
Drake Equation, Frank Drake, Seti Institute.
“The signals are so strong that we only need a small telescope to receive them. Smaller telescopes can offer more observational time, and that is good because we need to search many stars for a chance of success,” said Drake.
The only downside is that extraterrestrials would need to be transmitting their signals in our direction, Drake said, though he sees this as a positive side to that limitation. “If we get a signal from someone who’s aiming for us, it could mean there’s altruism in the universe. I like that idea. If they want to be friendly, that’s who we will find.”
Scientists have searched the skies for radio signals for more than 50 years and expanded their search into the optical realm more than a decade ago. The idea of searching in the infrared is not a new one, but instruments capable of capturing pulses of infrared light only recently became available.
“We had to wait,” Wright said. “I spent eight years waiting and watching as new technology emerged.”
Now that technology has caught up, the search will extend to stars thousands of light years away, rather than just hundreds. NIROSETI, or Near-Infrared Optical Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, could also uncover new information about the physical universe.
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