Polarization Modeling and Predictions for DKIST Part 5: Impacts of enhanced mirror and dichroic coatings on system polarization calibration

Abstract: The DKIST is designed to deliver accurate spectropolarimetric calibrations across a wide wavelength range and large field of view for solar observations. Instruments deliver spectral resolving powers up to 300,000 in multiple cameras of several instrument. We require detailed knowledge of optical coatings on all optics to ensure we can predict and calibrate the polarization behavior of the system. Optical coatings can be metals protected by many dielectric layers or several-micron thick dichroics. Strong spectral gradients up to 60deg retardance per nanometer wavelength and several percent diattenuation per nanometer wavelength are observed in such coatings. Often, optical coatings are not specified with spectral gradient targets for polarimetry in combination to both average and spectral threshold type specifications. DKIST has a suite of interchangeable dichroic beam splitters using up to 96 layers. We apply the Berreman formalism in open-source Python scripts to derive coating polarization behavior. We present high spectral resolution examples on dichroics where transmission can drop 10% with associated polarization changes over a 1 nm spectral bandpass in both mirrors and dichroics. We design dichroic coatings that pass polarization spectral gradient requirements in addition to reflectivity. We now can fit multi-layer coating designs to predict system level polarization properties of mirrors, anti-reflection coatings and dichroics at arbitrary incidence angles, high spectral resolving power on curved surfaces through optical modeling software packages. Polarization predictions for large astronomical telescopes require significant metrology efforts on individual optical components combined with systems-level modeling efforts. We show our custom-built laboratory spectropolarimeter and metrology efforts on protected metal mirrors, anti-reflection coatings and dichroic mirror samples.