Master’s Thesis:
Optical Fiber Characterization for Robotic Fiber
Positioners
The EPFL Astrobots Group develops robotic fiber positioners for the focal planes of ground-based telescopes, where thousands of miniature robots each point an optical fiber at an individual star or galaxy. The optical quality of those fibers, in particular their Focal Ratio Degradation (FRD) and throughput, sets a hard limit on the quality of the science data, and how the fibers are handled, integrated and moved by the robots is still an open engineering question.
This project characterizes FRD in fibers before and after integration into the robotic fiber positioners, including repeatability and the dependence on wavelength and input f-number. The results feed directly into future spectroscopic surveys such as MUST, Spec-S5 and WST, and into the focal plane of MOSAIC for the ELT. More information can be found here.