A Flexible Quasioptical Input System for a Submillimeter Muliobject Spectrometer

TL;DR

This paper proposes a low-loss, flexible optical input system for submillimeter multi-object spectrometers, enabling efficient observations of sparsely distributed sources with broadband capabilities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mirror-based optical system with patrol regions for each receiver, allowing flexible beam positioning and broadband, frequency-independent illumination.

Findings

Low-loss beam propagation with only 4 reflections.

Flexible beam positioning within patrol regions.

Broadband, frequency-independent illumination.

Abstract

We present a conceptual design for the input optical system for a multi-object spectrometer operating at submillimeter wavelengths. The Mirror MOS is based on a sequence of mirrors that enables low-loss propagation of beams from selected positions distributed throughout the focal plane to the spectroscopic receiver inputs. This approach should be useful for observations of sources which have a relatively low density on the sky, for which it is inefficient to use a traditional array receiver with uniformly spaced, relatively closely packed beams. Our concept is based on assigning a patrol region to each of the receivers, which have inputs distributed over the focal plane of the telescope. The input to each receiver can be positioned at any point within this patrol region. This approach, with only 4 reflections, offers very low loss. The Gaussian beam optical system can be designed to produce frequency-independent illumination of the telescope, which is an important advantage for broadband systems such those required for determination of redshifts of submillimeter galaxies.