Nemanja Jovanovic’s day job at Caltech’s Optical Observatory and Exoplanet Technology Laboratory is to develop extremely customised astronomical instruments for observatories, he told Electro Optics earlier this year. So what are the technologies he is looking to in developing those new instruments?
‘Photonic technologies optimised to generate signals, which can be used to drive wavefront control loops for adaptive optics systems and fine phasing in the form of fringe tracking are receiving a lot of attention,’ he said.
‘Such systems allow for wavefront control free from non-common path and chromatic errors, potentially delivering superior coupling efficiency, and hence an improved overall system efficiency, greater stability, and higher sensitivity.’
Jovanovic believes efficient integration with detectors and scaling to high pixel counts will be the biggest challenge in astrophotonics over the next decade: ‘Multi-pixel detectors are extremely costly and have a form factor mismatch with the output of integrated photonic circuits. Developing approaches to efficiently route the light from planar circuits to multi-pixel arrays will enable the realisation of integrated instruments.’
Organisation: California Institute of Technology
Role: Lead Instrument Scientist
Based in: Los Angeles, US
Education: PhD in laser development