INNOVATIVE 15-BAND OPTICAL FILTERS
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ALLUXA DEVELOPS INNOVATIVE 15-BAND OPTICAL FILTERS FOR ETSI ASTRONOMY PROJECT
The company’s unique multi-band optical filter design is integral to Texas A&M’s Exoplanet Transmission Spectroscopy Imager (ETSI) instrument.
Alluxa, Inc., a global leader in high-performance optical coatings and filters and thin-film deposition technologies, announces the ground-breaking development of 15-band optical filters for use in the Exoplanet Transmission Spectroscopy Imager (ETSI) instrument at Texas A&M University, Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy, and Department of Physics & Astronomy (https://physics.tamu.edu/). ETSI is the first precision instrument that can examine hundreds of exoplanet transmission spectra from a modest ground-based, observatory utilizing small to medium-class telescopes.
The ETSI makes use of a new characterization technique called common-path multi-band imaging (CMI). The optical design of the instrument includes a prism and Alluxa’s novel mutli-band optical filters to simultaneously image 15 bandpasses on two detectors (from 430 nm – 975 nm) during exoplanet transits of a bright star. This pioneering design enables ETSI to achieve unprecedented photometric precision during transit spectroscopy measurements.
Mike Scobey, a co-author of the paper and CEO at Alluxa, notes, “The Alluxa engineering team developed the custom 15-band technology for Texas A&M for this groundbreaking ETSI project to detect the atmospheres of exoplanets of distant stars. The technique should also scale into larger and more sensitive telescopes with the potential to facilitate detection of the first habitable planets outside our solar system. We are extremely pleased to have contributed to this important endeavor and look forward to seeing the future results.”
“ETSI and the CMI technique may offer a gateway for characterizing almost all transiting exoplanets and potential habitability from ground-based observatories,” according to the collaborative white paper from Texas A&M University and Alluxa, Inc. To learn more about the Exoplanet Transmission Spectroscopy Imager, download the white paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.00795.pdf.
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Why Alluxa
Alluxa is an ISO 9001:2015 certified, ITAR registered manufacturer of high-performance optical filters and thin-film coatings. Alluxa has rapidly grown from a small startup to a world leader in precision thin films. Our engineering team has been instrumental in achieving this growth by refining our advanced SIRRUS™ Plasma Deposition process, designing and building our coating equipment, and dedicating a large amount of resources to research and development. Meanwhile, our leadership team has been reinvesting in the business and creating a progressive company culture that benefits both our customers and our people. Located in Santa Rosa, CA, Alluxa was founded in 2007 by a team of thin film deposition veterans. Alluxa's core team brings together decades of expertise and diverse backgrounds in deposition, automation, metrology, and optics. Alluxa produces its filters with a new class of custom optical thin film coating equipment designed and built by our team. The combination of our state of the art automation, proprietary control algorithms, and a patented plasma thin film deposition process allows the world's most difficult filters to be created in a fraction of the time required by other hard coating methods. Using this proprietary thin film optical coating platform, Alluxa is delivering custom solutions to the most challenging optical coating problems - including bringing lower costs to high performance requirements.
