The Fizeau type interferometric telescope forms an array of several sub telescopes for direct imaging on the image plane based on the principle of optical interferometry. Compared to the optical long baseline interferometer, this kind of telescope can be used for real time imaging of celestial body due to some excellent characteristics such as sufficient spatial frequencies coverage, single mounting avoiding outer optical delay lines and so on. We have built an interferometric imaging telescope with four apertures. Although each aperture size is 100mm, but this telescope can reach the higher angular resolution which is equivalent to a monolithic telescope of 280mm aperture size through optimal array configuration. Some novel opto-mechanical structure design and error control methods have been applied to this telescope successfully. For example, in order to enhance the rigidity of mechanical system, a unique C-shape structure to replace the traditional azimuth axis is adapted. Piston, tip/tilt errors between all apertures can be detected at the same time by extracting signals from Modulation Transfer Function (MTF), so some classical beam splitters can be removed which will reduce light loss significantly. At present, we have finished the final assembly, co-phasing calibration and verifying of dynamic co-phasing close-loop methods at laboratory. The FWHM of far field image spot is 0.43 arcsecond which is consistent with theoretical values. The out-door astronomical observation will be carried out soon.
Hierarchical Fringe Trackers (HFT) maximize the sensitivity and accuracy of fringe tracking. Their performances are independent from the number of apertures. They cophase pairs of telescopes, then pairs of pairs and so on. We report the key results of mathematical analysis, design, manufacturing, optical tests and simulated performances of 4 telescopes HFT chips for the VLTI and 6 to 8 telescopes HFT chips for CHARA or a VLTI extension. An end-to-end simulation with realistic input piston and flux, based on the experimental characterization of the signals on the test bench, validates the servo loop and state machine architectures and supports the performance analysis, confirming the expected performance gain of about 3 magnitudes (with a limiting magnitude K>16 on the VLTI with UTs) and the fact that the performances do not decrease with the number of apertures. The performance gain is based on the combination of the HFT architecture with a very broad band HFT covering the 1.1 to 2.2μm domain with 3 to 5 HFT chips working in broad sub bands in J, H and K. Analysis of fringe jumps and losses at the sensitivity limit show that an HFT manages then more efficiently than the standard pairwise architecture. The impact of HFT characteristics on AGN science programs for optical interferometers is illustrated, showing that this architecture is the key for fascinating applications including direct distance measurements of AGNs accurate enough to contribute to the Hubble tension problem.
We discuss a new generation fringe tracker (FT) that implements a Hierarchical Fringe Tracker (HFT) architecture with a very broad band near infrared spectral coverage from 1.1 to 2.2μm in the J, H and K bands. The goal is to approach the absolute maximum fringe tracking sensitivity in optical long baseline interferometry, first on the VLTI, and to show that an HFT has performances independent from the number of apertures, a key characteristic for larger interferometers from CHARA to the VLTI with more UTs or combining all UTs and ATs to future very large interferometers. This paper describes the development in progress of an end-to-end simulator of such a system based on our first laboratory tests of prototype HFT. This simulator already allowed us to define a new optimization for the integrated optics HFT chips, to discuss a set of operating parameters for our new generation fringe tracker and to confirm that it is applicable to an indefinite number of apertures and should approach or even exceed a limiting sensitivity on the VLTI of K~16, which is a gain of at least 3 magnitudes over the expected performance of the current GRAVITY FT in the context of the ongoing GRAVITY+ VLTI upgrade.
The 100m-baseline optical interferometer in China is now under construction. It consists of three 600mm telescopes and forms a maximum baseline of 100 meter. The three telescopes are placed in domes with an auxiliary room used for the adaptive optics and the dual field optics. The central optical room are used to place the delay lines and the beam combiners . The dome and the central optical room are connected by vacuum pipeline. It is hoped to compensate the opd with a residual of 100nm @ H band. The goal of imaging resolution is about 1.7mas when observation in H band. The main science goals of the telescope array are to achieve high precision astrometry, and to image the bright stars with high resolution.
The Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) is currently the best infrastructure for long-baseline interferometry in particular in terms of sensitivity and accessibility to the general user. MATISSE, installed at the VLTI focus since end of 2017, belongs to the second generation instruments. MATISSE, the Multi AperTure mid-Infrared SpectroScopic Experiment, for the first time accesses high resolution imaging over a wide spectral domain of the mid-infrared. The instrument is a spectro-interferometric imager in the atmospheric transmission windows called L, M, and N, from 2.8 to 13.0 microns, and combines four optical beams from the VLTI’s unit or auxiliary telescopes. The instrument utilises a multi-axial beam combination that delivers spectrally dispersed fringes. The signal provides the following quantities at several spectral resolutions: photometric flux, coherent flux, visibility, closure phase, wavelength differential visibility and phase, and aperture-synthesis imaging. MATISSE can operate as a stand alone instrument or with the GRA4MAT set-up employing the GRAVITY fringe tracking capabilities. The updated MATISSE performance are presented at the conference together with a selection of two front-line science topics explored since the start of the science operations in 2019. Finally we present the perspective and benefit of two technical improvements foreseen in the coming years: the MATISSE-Wide off-axis fringe tracking capability and new adaptive optics for the UTs in the context of the GRAVITY+ project.
Hierarchical Fringe Tracking (HFT) is a fringe tracking concept optimizing the sensitivity in optical long baseline by reducing to an absolute minimum the number of measurements used to correct the OPD fluctuations. By nature, the performances of an HFT do not decreases with the number of apertures of the interferometer and are set only by the flux delivered by the individual telescopes. This a critical feature for future interferometers with large number of apertures both for homodyne and heterodyne operation. Here we report the design and first optical bench tests of integrated optics HFT chips for a 4 telescopes interferometer such as the VLTI. These tests validate the HFT concept and confirm previous estimates that we could track accurately fringes on the VLTI up to nearly K~15.9 with the UTs and K~12.2 with the ATs with a J+H+K fringe tracker with one HFT chip per band. This is typically 2.5 magnitudes fainter than the best potential performance of the current ABCD fringe tracker in the K band. An active longitudinal and transverse chromatic dispersion correction allows the optimization of broad band fiber injections and instrumental contrast. We also present a preliminary evaluation of the potential of such a gain of sensitivity for the observations of AGNs with the VLTI.
VERMILION is a VLTI visitor instrument project intended to extend the sensitivity and the spectral coverage of Optical Long Baseline Interferometry (OLBIn). It is based on a new concept of Fringe Tracker (VERMILIONFT) combined with a J band spectro-interferometer (VERMILION-J). The Fringe Tracker is the Adaptive Optics module specific to OLBIn that measures and corrects in real time the Optical Path Difference (OPD) perturbations introduced by the atmosphere and the interferometer, by providing a sensitivity gain of 2 to 3 magnitudes over all other state of the art fringe trackers. The J band spectro-interferometer will provide all interferometric measurements as a function of wavelength. In addition to a possible synergy with MATISSE, VERMILION-J, by observing at high spectral resolution many strong lines in J (Paβ-γ, HeII, TiO and other metallic monoxides), will cover several scientific topics, e.g. Exoplanets, YSOs, Binaries, Active Hot, Evolved stars, Asteroseismology, and also AGNs.
The current work presents a fiber coupling tip-tilt controller developed for a three-telescope experimental prototype of an Astronomical Fiber-Based Near-Infrared Heterodyne Interferometer. It is based on a commercial magneto-mechanical compact-disk laser-beam actuator on which the fiber-ferrule is mounted. The actuator is driven by a two-axis controller electronics board which was developed by us based on digital processing in a dsPIC33EP device with analog periphery, which reads the quad-photodiode signals amplified by 109, and drives the actuator with two high-current outputs. While this realizes the very fine and relatively fast (up to 100 Hz) fiber-position control in the telescope focus, as a basis to this, a relatively coarse and slow auto-guiding is given by an amateur guiding camera. During first optical bench testing we obtained an average coupled power increase of up to 50% under certain perturbations.
Recent results for the cross-correlation signal of a newly proposed balanced correlation receiver at 1.5 μm pointed towards a possible bypassing of the standard quantum limit for the receiver noise-temperature hν⁄k in cross-correlation by a factor of 4-6. The only radiation source strong enough for a clear hot-cold measurement was a heavily attenuated fiber-coupled superluminant LED (SLED), because a multi-mode fiber-coupled thermal halogen lamp was difficult to control in polarization due to its weakness when coupled to a single-mode fiber. This peculiarity left some doubts regarding a possible “strange” quantum-mechanical behavior of the signal light from the SLED. Here we want to present the concept for more convincing measurements using a true thermal signal source.
We propose a new high dynamic imaging concept for the detection and characterization of extra-solar planets. DIFFRACT standing for DIFFerential Remapped Aperture Coronagraphic Telescope, uses a Wollaston prism to split the entrance pupil into two exit pupils. These exit pupils are then remapped with 2 apertures lenses of different diameters resulting in two separate rescaled focal images of the same star. Since the angular separation of a putative exoplanet orbiting around the star is independent of the angular resolution of the remapped output pupils they appear at the same linear location in the resulting images that differ in resolution proportional to the exit pupil sizes.
Exoplanet detection is obtained by numerically rescaling the images at the same angular resolution and substracting them, so that, under aberration and photon noise free conditions the planet twin images appear as two positive and negative Airy patterns. In real conditions however and depending on the exoplanet separation normalized to the angular resolution of the input telescope detection performances depend strongly on the adaptive optics performances and the collecting surface of the telescope. In this study we present the formal expression of DIFFRACT optics concept with a complet set of numerical experiments to
estimate the performances of the concept under real observing conditions including instrument and adaptive optics corrections.
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