General performance analysis of a Fizeau interferometer

Sebastian E. Egner; Thomas M. Herbst; Carmelo Arcidiacono

doi:10.1117/12.787807

28 July 2008 General performance analysis of a Fizeau interferometer

Sebastian E. Egner, Thomas M. Herbst, Carmelo Arcidiacono

Proceedings Volume 7013, Optical and Infrared Interferometry; 70133C (2008) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.787807
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2008, Marseille, France

Abstract

A Fizeau interferometer combines the light of several telescopes to obtain panoramic images with an angular resolution equivalent to the longest edge-to-edge separation in the system. The overall performance of a Fizeau interferometer depends critically on the performance of the (MC)AO system and the efficiency of atmospheric piston correction, but also on other effects like alignment accuracies, filter bandwidths, tracking errors, atmospheric dispersion and field rotation. Due to the mutual dependence, Strehl ratio or fringe contrast like in conventional Adaptive Optics systems or pupil plane interferometers are not sufficient for a consice assessment of the performance of such an instrument. As a measure for the actual performance, we propose to use the ratio R23, which is the actual high-spatial frequency information in the images, divided by what could be measured in principal with a 23m telescope (as the LBT). We present the theoretical concept of this method and show the results of various simulations of the abovementioned effects as an application to LINC-NIRVANA, a Fizeau interferometer currently being built for the LBT.

Citation Download Citation

Sebastian E. Egner, Thomas M. Herbst, and Carmelo Arcidiacono "General performance analysis of a Fizeau interferometer", Proc. SPIE 7013, Optical and Infrared Interferometry, 70133C (28 July 2008); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.787807

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