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For near‐infrared ground and space‐based astronomy, compact photonic devices can replace the large bulk optical components in spectrographs, frequency combs, beam combiners, and sky subtraction filters, thus saving cost, reducing volume, weight, and power requirements. Photonic integrated circuits (PICs), analogous to integrated circuits (IC) in electronics, are particularly powerful to address innovative miniaturized solutions. Here, we demonstrate two new instrument prototypes: the Potsdam Arrayed Waveguide Spectrograph (PAWS) built around an array waveguide grating (AWG) PIC and Hawaii2RG detector, and the Potsdam Comb (POCO), a frequency comb generated by nonlinear processes in a micro‐ring resonator photonic chip. PAWS is calibrated by the remotely located POCO via the fiber optic communication network of the Leibniz‐Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP). The vision of future astrophotonic solutions for instrumentation is pointing toward hybrid solutions of PIC and detector arrays that hold the promise to dramatically change the layout of telescope focal plane instrumentation.

Photonic Integrated Circuits (PIC) are best known for their important role in the telecommunication sector, e.g. high speed communication devices in data centers. However, PIC also hold the promise for innovation in sectors like life science, medicine, sensing, automotive etc. The past two decades have seen efforts of utilizing PIC to enhance the performance of instrumentation for astronomical telescopes, perhaps the most spectacular example being the integrated optics beam combiner for the interferometer GRAVITY at the ESO Very Large Telescope. This instrument has enabled observations of the supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way at unprecedented angular resolution, eventually leading to the Nobel Price for Physics in 2020. Several groups worldwide are actively engaged in the emerging field of astrophotonics research, amongst them the innoFSPEC Center in Potsdam, Germany. We present results for a number of applications developed at innoFSPEC, notably PIC for integrated photonic spectrographs on the basis of arrayed waveguide gratings and the PAWS demonstrator (Potsdam Arrayed Waveguide Spectrograph), PIC-based ring resonators in astronomical frequency combs for precision wavelength calibration, discrete beam combiners (DBC) for large astronomical interferometers, as well as aperiodic fiber Bragg gratings for complex astronomical filters and their possible derivatives in PIC.

The Potsdam Arrayed Waveguide Spectrograph (PAWS) is based on an integrated photonic spectrograph designed and developed by innoFSPEC to work in the astronomical H‐band. PAWS demonstrates how a traditional bulk optics spectrograph can be miniaturized and additionally serves as a tool for testing in‐house developed astrophotonical devices. The main element is a second‐generation Arrayed Waveguide Grating (AWG) with unprecedented performance in terms of spectral resolution and throughput that is fiber‐coupled and works as a first dispersive component. The pre‐dispersed light is fed into a free‐space optical system located in a cryostat, where the overlapping spectral orders are separated by cross‐dispersion. The resulting echellogram is recorded by a Teledyne 2k×2k H2RG near‐infrared array. Once the cryogenic cross‐dispersion optics inside the vacuum chamber were appropriately aligned to the AWG coupling optics outside of the chamber, different light sources were used to test the functionality of the complete system. A tunable laser source was used to create an echellogram through frame stacking. Additionally, the cross‐dispersed output of a supercontinuum source was recorded using different input waveguides of the AWG, and first light was achieved with laboratory measurements. PAWS represents a pioneering demonstration of an astronomy‐optimized AWG chip, exhibiting the advantageous capabilities of integrated photonic spectrographs, in particular in the context of space applications.