Demonstration of high-efficiency photonic lantern couplers for PolyOculus

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates a novel photonic lantern for PolyOculus that significantly improves fiber optic coupling efficiency, enabling scalable, cost-effective large-area telescopes with high broadband performance.

Contribution

First laboratory demonstration of a photonic lantern prototype for PolyOculus, achieving ~91% broadband efficiency, surpassing previous free-space optical linkages.

Findings

Achieved ~91% broadband efficiency in lab tests.

Photonic lantern offers higher coupling efficiency than free-space links.

Enables scalable, low-cost large-area telescope arrays.

Abstract

The PolyOculus technology produces large-area-equivalent telescopes by using fiber optics to link modules of multiple semi-autonomous, small, inexpensive, commercial-off-the-shelf telescopes. Crucially, this scalable design has construction costs which are > 10x lower than equivalent traditional large-area telescopes. We have developed a novel photonic lantern approach for the PolyOculus fiber optic linkages which potentially offers substantial advantages over previously considered free-space optical linkages, including much higher coupling efficiencies. We have carried out the first laboratory tests of a photonic lantern prototype developed for PolyOculus, and demonstrate broadband efficiencies of ~91%, confirming the outstanding performance of this technology.