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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