Related papers: Stabilising a nulling interferometer using optical…
Imaging the direct light signal from a faint exoplanet against the overwhelming glare of its host star presents one of the fundamental challenges to modern astronomical instrumentation. Achieving sufficient signal-to-noise for detection by…
Nulling interferometry is a technique providing high angular resolution which is the core of the space missions Darwin and the Terrestrail Planet Finder. The first objective is to reach a deep degree of starlight cancelation in the range 6…
Nulling interferometry is a promising technique for direct detection of exoplanets. However, the performance of current devices is limited by different perturbations sources and especially by its sensitivity to any phase aberrations. The…
The maximum baseline, and therefore resolution, of optical astronomical interferometers is limited by attenuation and phase noise within the optical path between the apertures and beam combiner, as well as the practical challenges of…
(Abridged) Context: In the previous paper in this series, we identified that a pentagonal arrangement of five telescopes, using a kernel-nulling beam combiner, shows notable advantages for some important performance metrics for a…
Nulling interferometry, a powerful technique for high-resolution imaging of the close neighbourhood of bright astrophysical objets, is currently considered for future space missions such as Darwin or the Terrestrial Planet Finder…
We report on the active stabilization of a Michelson interferometer at an arbitrary phase angle with a precision better than one degree at $\lambda = 632.8$ nm, which corresponds to an optical path difference between the two arms of less…
Interference is a powerful tool for measuring and control. In M\"ossbauer science, interference effects are essential to most applications, due to the coherent scattering nature. However, M\"ossbauer interferometry remains challenging, due…
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…
Thermally induced fluctuations impose a fundamental limit on precision measurement. In optical interferometry, the current bounds of stability and sensitivity are dictated by the excess mechanical damping of the high-reflectivity coatings…
The detection and atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable, temperate terrestrial exoplanets using a space-based mid-infrared nulling interferometer is a major goal of contemporary astrophysics. A central part of the analysis…
We present analytical and numerical results on the joint dynamics of two coupled Duffing oscillators with nonlinearity of opposite signs (hardening and softening). In particular, we focus on the existence and stability of synchronized…
The optical interferometry has been widely used in various high precision applications. Usually, the minimum precision of an interferometry is limited by various technique noises in practice. To suppress such kind of noises, we propose a…
Instrumentation designed to characterize potentially habitable planets may combine adaptive optics and high-resolution spectroscopy techniques to achieve the highest possible sensitivity to spectral signs of life. Detecting the weak signal…
Space borne nulling interferometry in the mid-infrared waveband is one of the most promising techniques for characterizing the atmospheres of extra-solar planets orbiting in the habitable zone of their parent star, and possibly discovering…
We present a simple method to stabilize the optical path length of an optical fiber to an accuracy of about 1/100 of the laser wavelength. We study the dynamic response of the path length to modulation of an electrically conductive heater…
The Palomar Fiber Nuller (PFN) is a rotating-baseline nulling interferometer that enables high-accuracy near-infrared (NIR) nulling observations with full azimuth coverage. To achieve NIR null-depth accuracies of several x 10-4, the PFN…
Detecting the presence of circumstellar dust around nearby solar-type main sequence stars is an important pre-requisite for the design of future life-finding space missions such as ESA's Darwin or NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF). The…
Nulling interferometry is an astronomical technique that combines equal wavefronts to achieve a deep rejection ratio of an on-axis star, and that could permit to detect Earth-like planets in the mid-infrared band 5 -- 20 microns. Similarly…
Vortex fiber nulling (VFN) is a single-aperture interferometric technique for detecting and characterizing exoplanets separated from their host star by less than a diffracted beam width. VFN uses a vortex mask and single mode fiber to…