Strategies for spectroscopy on Extremely Large Telescope. III - Remapping switched fibre systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates remapping techniques in highly-multiplexed fibre systems to enhance the efficiency of astronomical spectroscopy, especially for complex target distributions in Extremely Large Telescopes.

Contribution

It introduces novel remapping strategies for fibre systems that improve target selection efficiency in Diverse Field Spectroscopy for ELTs.

Findings

Remapping allows contiguous spatial regions to be selected with simple switch arrays.

DFS with remapping outperforms integral-field and multiobject spectroscopy in simulations.

Techniques are applicable to biomedical sciences as well.

Abstract

We explore the use of remapping techniques to improve the efficiency of highly-multiplexed fibre systems for astronomical spectroscopy. This is particularly important for the implementation of Diverse Field Spectroscopy (DFS, described in Paper II) using highly-multiplexed monolithic fibre systems (MFS). Diverse Field Spectroscopy allows arbitrary distributions of target regions to be addressed to optimise observing efficiency when observing complex, clumpy structures such as protoclusters which will be increasingly accessible to Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTS). We show how the adoption of various types of remapping between the input and output of a Monolithic Fibre Systems can allow contiguous regions of spatial elements to be selected using only simple switch arrays. Finally we show how this compares in efficiency with integral-field and multiobject spectroscopy by simulations using artificial and real catalogues of objects. With the adoption of these mapping strategies, DFS outperforms other techniques when addressing a range of realistic target distributions. These techniques are also applicable to bio-medical science and were in fact inspired by it.