Nulling interferometry has been identified as a competitive technique for the detection of extrasolar planets. The technique consists in combining out-of-phase pairs of telescopes to null effectively the light of a bright star an reveal the dim glow of the companion. We have manufactured and tested with monochromatic light an integrated optics component which combines a linear array of 4 telescopes in the nulling mode envisaged by Angel & Wolf (1997). Our testbench simulates the motion of a star in the sky. The tests have demonstrated a nulling scaling as the fourth power of the baseline delay.
@article{arxiv.1405.6549,
title = {Integrated optics interferometric four telescopes nuller},
author = {Ronny Errmann and Stefano Minardi and Lucas Labadie and Felix Dreisow and Stefan Nolte and Thomas Pertsch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1405.6549},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
SPIE Astronomical Telescopes and Instumentation Conference 2014, Paper 9146-77, 7 pages, 5 figures