Proposal for the optical design of three robust and highly performing FPI systems for the European Solar Telescope

TL;DR

This paper proposes three robust, high-performance optical FPI systems for the European Solar Telescope, inspired by successful designs from Swedish solar telescopes, emphasizing simplicity, stability, and flexibility.

Contribution

It introduces a novel optical design for FPI systems tailored for EST, combining heritage concepts with new optimizations for robustness and performance.

Findings

Designs achieve high spectral resolution and image quality

Systems are compact with less than 4.7 m optical path

Proposed systems are easier to manufacture and align

Abstract

We describe a proposal for the optical design of three dual Fabry-Perot based narrowband filter systems for for the future European Solar Telescope (EST). These are intended to constitute the core elements of three imaging spectropolarimeters, foreseen to become amongst the most important science instruments for EST. The designs proposed here rely heavily on the heritage of CRISP and CHROMIS, developed for the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope and described in detail in a companion paper (Scharmer et al. 2025, in prep.). The outstanding performance of these systems, and the simplicity of their designs, provide strong support of our proposal to build similar systems for EST. The design concepts involve i) minimising the FPI clear aperture diameter by means of numerical simulations based on constraints on Strehl and spectral resolution set by the EST Science Advisory Group (SAG); ii) a compact telecentric optical design with an optical path length of less than 4.7 m; iii) a straight-through optical system based on lenses and without any folding mirrors; iv) the combination of a high resolution etalon with high reflectivity and a low reflectivity, low resolution etalon, to mitigate the effects of cavity errors (Scharmer 2006, Scharmer et al. 2025); v) flexibility in terms of image scale by simple replacement of the last lens (the camera lens) of the FPI system. We propose to compensate for the focus curve of ESTs Pier Optical Path (POP) by focusing the camera lenses of the FPI systems. s. The proposed systems should offer several advantages over other much more complex systems, including manufacture, alignment, stability, flexibility of changes of image scale, and costs. The underlying design concepts also make the proposed FPI systems robust and highly performing in terms of image quality, overall transmission, and fidelity of the spectral transmission profile.