Optical, mechanical and electronic design and integration of POMM, a polarimeter for the Observatoire du mont Mégantic

Melanie R. Leclerc; Patrice Côté; François Duchesne; Pierre Bastien; Olivier Hernandez; Pierre Colonna d'Istria; Mathieu Demers; Marc Girard; Maxime Savard; Dany Lemieux; Simon Thibault; Denis Brousseau

doi:10.1117/12.2054773

28 July 2014 Optical, mechanical and electronic design and integration of POMM, a polarimeter for the Observatoire du mont Mégantic

Melanie R. Leclerc, Patrice Côté, François Duchesne, Pierre Bastien, Olivier Hernandez, Pierre Colonna d'Istria, Mathieu Demers, Marc Girard, Maxime Savard, Dany Lemieux, Simon Thibault, Denis Brousseau

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9147, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V; 91472D (2014) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2054773
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2014, Montréal, Quebec, Canada

Abstract

A polarimeter, to observe exoplanets in the visible and infrared, was built for the “Observatoire du Mont Mégantic” (OMM) to replace an existing instrument and reach 10^-6 precision, a factor 100 improvement. The optical and mechanical designs are presented, with techniques used to precisely align the optical components and rotation axes to achieve the targeted precision. A photo-elastic modulator (PEM) and a lock-in amplifier are used to measure the polarization. The typical signal is a high DC superimposed to a very faint sinusoidal oscillation. Custom electronics was developed to measure the AC and DC amplitudes, and characterization results are presented.

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Melanie R. Leclerc, Patrice Côté, François Duchesne, Pierre Bastien, Olivier Hernandez, Pierre Colonna d'Istria, Mathieu Demers, Marc Girard, Maxime Savard, Dany Lemieux, Simon Thibault, and Denis Brousseau "Optical, mechanical and electronic design and integration of POMM, a polarimeter for the Observatoire du mont Mégantic", Proc. SPIE 9147, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V, 91472D (28 July 2014); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2054773

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