Bibcode
Jochum, Lieselotte; Herrero, Pilar; Collados, Manuel; Martinez Pillet, Valentin; Rodriguez, Javier; Lopez, Manuel
Referencia bibliográfica
Polarimetry in Astronomy. Edited by Silvano Fineschi . Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 4843, pp. 30-38 (2003).
Advertised on:
2
2003
Número de citas
1
Número de citas referidas
0
Descripción
The Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), Spain, together
with the Spanish company Tecdis Displays Ibérica, S.A., are
developing voltage tunable optical retarders using liquid crystals as
phase retarding medium. The ROCLIs are built for being used in the
Imaging Magnetograph eXperiment (IMaX), which is one of the instruments
aboard of the SUNRISE balloon mission (details about IMaX are described
in a different paper in this session). A big advantage of using voltage
tuned retarder plates is that no mechanisms are needed, which reduces
significantly failure risk, weight, power and cost, aspects of
particular importance in the SUNRISE balloon mission and for many future
space borne applications. A set of prototypes has already been
fabricated by Tecdis S.A. and is being characterized in the IAC
laboratories. The purpose of these prototypes is to evaluate and
demonstrate conceptually the suitability of the chosen liquid crystal
for our use in IMaX. First results are very promising. In this paper we
will present a full technical description of the ROCLIs for IMaX
together with the laboratory test and verification results.