The SOAR integral field unit spectrograph optical design and IFU implementation

Abstract

SIFS is a lenslet/fiber Integral Field Unit Spectrograph which has just been delivered to the SOAR 4.1m telescope in Chile. The instrument was designed and constructed by the National Laboratory of Astrophysics (MCT/LNA) in collaboration with the Department of Astronomy of the Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmospheric Sciences of the University of Sao Paulo (IAG/USP). It is designed to operate at both the raw Nasmyth and the SAM (the SOAR Adaptive Optics Module) which delivers GLAO-corrected images in optical wave-bands longward of 500nm. The lenslets have a 1mm pitch feeding a set of 1,300 fibres in a 26-by-50 format. Sets of deployable fore-optics convert the f/16.5 input beam to give samplings between ~0.1 and 0.3 arcsec. The fiber output is in the form of a curved, pupil-centric, long-slit which is fed into a bench-mounted spectrograph. An off-axis Maksutov collimates the beam onto a set of VPH gratings and thence imaged by an f/3 refractive camera onto a 2-by-1 mosaic of 2k-by-4k E2V CCDs. The camera is articulated over a >90 deg. angle to allow the grating/camera combination to operate in a transmission Littrow configuration. The wavelength range is limited by the CCDs to the 350 to 1000nm range with spectral resolution maxima of ~20,000. The paper will review the optical design of the spectrograph and the methods used to fabricate the lenslet/fiber IFU.