Development of micro image slicer of integral field unit for spaceborne solar spectrograph

We present an innovative optical design for image slicer integral field unit (IFU) and manufacturing method which overcome optical limitation of metallic mirrors. Our IFU consists of micro image slicer of 45 arrayed highly-narrow flat metallic mirrors and a pseudo pupil mirror array of off-axis conic aspheres forming three pseudo slits of re-arranged slicer images. A prototype IFU demonstrates their optical quality high enough for a visible light spectrograph. The each slicer mirror is 1.58 mm in length and 30μm in width with surface roughness < 1 nm rms, edge sharpness < 0.1μm, etc. This IFU is small-sized and can be implemented in a multi-slit spectrograph without any moving mechanism and fore optics in which one slit is real and the others are of pseudo slits from the IFU. Those properties are well suitable for space-borne spectrograph to be aboard such as a next Japanese solar mission SOLAR-C.