In stellar interferometry, image quality improves significantly with the inclusion of more telescopes and the use of phase closure. We demonstrate, using first coherent and then partially coherent white light, a compact and efficient pair-wise combination of twelve or more beams. The input beams are lined up and spread through a cylindrical lens into a comb of parallel ellipses, which interferes with a perpendicular copy of itself to form a matrix of interferograms between all pairs. The diagonal elements show interference of each beam with itself, for in-tensity calibration. The measured white-light visibilities were high and stable.
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0702294,
title = {A simple beam combination for stellar interferometry},
author = {E. N. Ribak and M. Gai and D. Loreggia and S. G. Lipson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0702294},
year = {2009}
}