Very high-resolution spectroscopy for extremely large telescopes using pupil slicing and adaptive optics

Abstract:
Under seeing limited conditions very high resolution spectroscopy becomes very difficult for extremely large telescopes (ELTs). Using adaptive optics (AO) the stellar image size decreases proportional with the telescope diameter. This makes the spectrograph optics and hence its resolution independent of the telescope diameter. However AO for use with ELTs at visible wavelengths require deformable mirrors with many elements. Those are not likely to be available for quite some time. We propose to use the pupil slicing technique to create a number of sub-pupils each of which having its own deformable mirror. The images from all subpupils are combined incoherently with a diameter corresponding to the diffraction limit of the sub-pupil. The technique is referred to as "Pupil Slicing Adaptive Optics" or PSAO. (c) 2007 Optical Society of America.