Abstract
In ground-based astronomy, starlight distorted by the atmosphere couples poorly into single-mode waveguides, but a correction by adaptive optics, even if only partial, can boost coupling into the few-mode regime, allowing the use of photonic lanterns to convert into multiple single-mode beams. Corrected wavefronts result in focal patterns that couple mostly with circularly symmetric waveguide modes. A mode-selective photonic lantern is hence proposed to convert multimode light into a subset of single-mode waveguides of the standard photonic lantern, thereby reducing the required number of outputs. We ran simulations to show that only two out of the six waveguides of a $1 \times 6$ photonic lantern carry ${\gt}95\%$ of the coupled light to the outputs at $D/{r_0} \lt 10$ if the wavefront is partially corrected and the photonic lantern is made mode selective.
© 2021 Optical Society of America
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