Manuel Collados, Roberto López, Carlos Quintero, Claudia Ruiz, Jonai Bienes.

The Integral Field Unit (IFU) is the system that allows spectroscopy of a 2D field of view. In this case, the IFU incorporates a slicer mirror, that slices the field arriving from the telescope. Then, through an optical system, the slices (called “slitlets”) are reorganized along a slit to feed the spectrograph. Within the framework of the Solarnet-H2020 project, the Canary Island Institute of Astrophysics is on the development of slicer mirror-based IFUs for solar spectropolarimetry. The goal is to meet the spatial resolution and field of view requirements of the EST telescope. The first IFU developed with a 100-μm width slicer mirror demonstrated the feasibility of this technology for solar spectropolarimetry. Therefore, to achieve the objectives, two different IFUs are being developed. In this presentation, we will discuss the development of the IFUs throughout the project, focusing specifically on the optical design of the latest IFU, with a 35-μm slicer, currently in development.