The Large Array Survey Telescope (LAST) is an optical telescope array under construction in Israel, developed at the Weizmann Institute. It consists of 48 small telescopes and will perform a high-cadence survey. Due to its large field of view, LAST can be used for observing all kinds of transients, early detection of Sne, binary star systems, exoplanets, ..., detection of gravitational waves and neutrinos, and optical follow-up for ULTRASAT.
Polarisation is a fundamental property of EM waves and provides information about physical processes and the geometry of the source. Sir James Hough, an international leader in the search for gravitational waves, said, "Knowledge of the polarisation state of radiation provides far more astrophysical information than intensity alone.”
Current polarisation telescopes are limited to a small field of view and bright sources. Our group at Ruhr-Universität Bochum is developing the hardware and software to make LAST the world's first polarisation survey. We are using the RUB campus observatory to develop and test our telescope design, and are performing observing runs at the LAST node in Israel to get first ideas about the expected performance.
In this talk, I will present our group's work over the last two years to build the LAST polarisation survey.
