Astrophotonics: The future of astronomical instrumentation

Astrophotonics - the interface of photonics and astronomical instrumentation - has already made important contributions to ground-based and space-based instrumentation (space photonics). The early developments built on technologies arising out of telecommunications but, in recent years, astrophotonics has begun to “give back” to traditional photonic fields. The main goals of astrophotonics are to deliver new instruments and science fields for the next generation of telescopes. Examples of the former are multimoded photonic action in large-core fibres, integrated photonic spectrographs, starlight suppression using vortex coronography, and high-performance interferometry across arbitrary sparse apertures. Examples of new science fields include “quantum astronomy” and the detection of photon orbital angular momentum from individual stars. We provide an overview of the expected impact of nanophotonics on the field of astrophotonics.