An innovative integral field unit upgrade with 3D-printed micro-lenses for the RHEA at Subaru

In the new era of Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) currently under construction, challenging requirements drive spectrograph designs towards techniques that efficiently use a facility's light collection power. Operating in the single-mode (SM) regime, close to the diffraction limit, reduces the footprint of the instrument compared to a conventional high-resolving power spectrograph. The custom built injection fiber system with 3D-printed microlenses on top of it for the replicable high-resolution exoplanet and asteroseismology spectrograph (RHEA) at Subaru in combination with extreme adaptive optics of SCExAO, proved its high efficiency in a lab environment, manifesting up to ~77% of the theoretical predicted performance.

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