Conceptual design of the infrared integral field spectropolarimeter for the European Solar Telescope

The European Solar Telescope (EST) will be Europe’s most ambitious ground-based infrastructure in solar physics. It will have a primary mirror with a diameter of 4.2m, which will make it the largest in Europe, and of identical aperture as the largest solar telescope available worldwide, namely the Daniel K. Inouye Telescope (DKIST) installed at the Haleakala summit, Hawai'i. EST will have two main characteristics devoted to maximising the scientific return. First, the telescope’s optical path will be polarisation-free using pairs of mirrors that compensate for instrumental polarisation. Second, the telescope will be designed together with a complete instrument suite with imaging and spectrograph instruments. EST will also bring many new technologies, such as a multi-conjugate adaptive optics system and integral field spectro-polarimeters. This contribution presents the conceptual design of the infrared (1 to 1.8 microns) integral field spectropolarimeter. The instrument will have an integral field unit composed of a mirror-based image slicer as input to a Czerny-Turner spectrograph. It will have a polarimeter to record the polarisation state of light on a dual-beam configuration to ensure high-precision spectro-polarimetry.