Hsim: a simulation pipeline for the HARMONI integral field spectrograph on the European ELT

Abstract

We present hsim: a dedicated pipeline for simulating observations with the High Angular Resolution Monolithic Optical and Near-infrared Integral field spectrograph (HARMONI) on the European Extremely Large Telescope. hsim takes high spectral and spatial resolution input data cubes, encoding physical descriptions of astrophysical sources, and generates mock observed data cubes. The simulations incorporate detailed models of the sky, telescope and instrument to produce realistic mock data. Further, we employ a new method of incorporating the strongly wavelength-dependent adaptive optics point spread functions. hsim provides a step beyond traditional exposure time calculators and allows us to both predict the feasibility of a given observing programme with HARMONI and perform instrument design trade-offs. In this paper, we concentrate on quantitative measures of the feasibility of planned observations. We give a detailed description of hsim and present two studies: estimates of point source sensitivities along with simulations of star-forming emission-line galaxies at z ∼ 2–3. We show that HARMONI will provide exquisite resolved spectroscopy of these objects on sub-kpc scales, probing and deriving properties of individual star-forming regions.