Performance testing and end-to-end mapping of the fiber cable on the SALT NIR integral field spectrograph

Abstract

The optical fiber integral field unit (IFU) built to feed the near infrared (NIR) spectrograph for the 11-meter Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) has undergone prototyping and rigorous performance testing at Washburn Astronomical Laboratories of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Astronomy Department. The 43 m length of 256 fibers which make up the object and sky arrays and spares are routed from the SALT payload down into the spectrograph room in four separate cables. The IFU covers 344 arcsec² on the sky, with the object array spanning a 552 arcsec² near-rectangular area at roughly 56% fill-factor. Companion papers describe the mechanical design of the fiber cable that mitigates potential sources of mechanical strain on the optical fiber (Smith et al.) and details of the spectrograph (Wolf et al.). Here we present the results of the performance testing of various test cables as well as performance testing and end-to-end mapping of the fully-assembled science cable. The fiber optics experience an extreme temperature gradient at the ingress to the instrument enclosure held at -40 ◦C during operation. We find an increase in focal ratio degradation (FRD) when holding progressively longer lengths of test fiber at reduced temperature. However, we confirm that this temperature dependent FRD is negligible for our designed length of cold fiber. We also find negligible contributions to FRD from the rubber seal that breaches the room temperature strain relief box and the cold instrument enclosure. Our measurements characterize performance including the effects of internal fiber inhomogeneities, stress induced from fiber handling and termination, as well as any imperfections from end-polishing. We present the room-temperature laboratory performance measurements of the fully-assembled science cable; the effective total throughput the fiber cable delivers to the spectrograph collimator is 81±2.5% across all fibers accounting for all losses.