Diffraction limited high-contrast imaging with the novel lenses-based integral field unit concept BIGRE

Abstract

Integral field spectroscopy (IFS) is extremely useful for high-contrast imaging purposes and integral field units (IFU) based on a matrix of lenses are suitable to guarantee low level of differential aberrations among the array of light footprints reaching the detector. To this purpose a new optical concept (BIGRE) for the lenses array adopted in integral field spectroscopy is here fully described, and characterized in the working case of two IFS instruments devoted to high-contrast imaging of extrasolar planets: SPHERE and EPICS, respectively for a 10 meter class telescope (VLT) and a 40 meter class (E-ELT) telescope. The aim of this work is the explanation of the BIGRE optical concept and its implementation on two IFS optical designs, optimized respectively for SPHERE and EPICS.