We present a stable, inexpensive wavelength reference, based on a white-light interferometer for the use on current and future (arrays of) diffraction-limited radial velocity (RV) spectrographs. The primary aim of using an interferometer is to obtain a dense sinusoidal wavelength reference with spectral coverage between 450-650 nm. Its basic setup consists of an unbalanced fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer (FMZI) that creates an interference pattern in the spectral domain due to superposition of phase delayed light, set by a fixed optical path-length difference (OPD). To achieve long-term stability, the interferometer is actively locked to a stable atomic line. The system operates in closed-loop using a thermo-optic modulator as the phase feedback component. We conducted stability measurements by superimposing the wavelength reference with thorium-argon (ThAr) emission lines and found the differential RMS shift to be ~5 m s^-1 within 30 minute bins in an experiment lasting 5 hours.

Date Published: 5 August 2014
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 9147, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V, 914780 (5 August 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2055674

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9147:
Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V
Suzanne K. Ramsay; Ian S. McLean; Hideki Takami, Editor(s)