# Astrophotonic Spectrographs

## TL;DR

Astrophotonic spectrographs utilize photonic technologies to create compact, efficient, and cost-effective spectrometers for astronomy, enabling significant miniaturization and improved performance over traditional instruments.

## Contribution

This paper reviews the development and potential of astrophotonic spectrographs, highlighting their advantages and various types like AWGs, PEGs, and FTS for astronomical applications.

## Key findings

- Astrophotonic spectrographs are smaller, cheaper, and more vibration-resistant than traditional spectrographs.
- Various types of astrophotonic spectrometers are being developed, including AWGs, PEGs, and FTS.
- These devices have applications in astronomy and biomedical analysis.

## Abstract

Astrophotonics is the application of photonic technologies to channel, manipulate, and disperse light from one or more telescopes to achieve scientific objectives in astronomy in an efficient and cost-effective way. Utilizing photonic advantage for astronomical spectroscopy is a promising approach to miniaturizing the next generation of spectrometers for large telescopes. It can be primarily attained by leveraging the two-dimensional nature of photonic structures on a chip or a set of fibers, thus reducing the size of spectroscopic instrumentation to a few centimeters and the weight to a few hundred grams. A wide variety of astrophotonic spectrometers is currently being developed, including arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs), photonic echelle gratings (PEGs), and Fourier-transform spectrometer (FTS). These astrophotonic devices are flexible, cheaper to mass produce, easier to control, and much less susceptible to vibrations and flexure than conventional astronomical spectrographs. The applications of these spectrographs range from astronomy to biomedical analysis. This paper provides a brief review of this new class of astronomical spectrographs.