Related papers: The Planar Optics Phase Sensor: a study for the VL…

Several types of Wavefront Sensors (WFS) are nowadays available in the field of Adaptive Optics (AO). Generally speaking, their basic principle consists in measuring slopes or curvatures of Wavefront Errors (WFE) transmitted by a telescope,…

The photonic lantern (PL) is a tapered waveguide that can efficiently couple light into multiple single-mode optical fibers. Such devices are currently being considered for a number of tasks, including the coupling of telescopes and…

Advanced wavefront sensors (WFS) are essential for enabling new science cases for telescopes that utilize adaptive optics (AO) systems. While complex field WFS -- those that estimate the electric field phase and amplitude through…

PIONIER is a 4-telescope visitor instrument for the VLTI, planned to see its first fringes in 2010. It combines four ATs or four UTs using a pairwise ABCD integrated optics combiner that can also be used in scanning mode. It provides low…

This paper aims at giving an update on the most versatile adaptive optics fed instrument to date, the well known and successful NACO . Although NACO is only scheduled for about two more years at the Very Large Telescope (VLT), it keeps on…

Context:Optical interferometry is at a key development stage. ESO's VLTI has established a stable, robust infrastructure for long-baseline interferometry for general astronomical observers. The present second-generation instruments offer a…

The third-generation South Pole Telescope camera is designed to measure the cosmic microwave background across three frequency bands (95, 150 and 220 GHz) with ~16,000 transition-edge sensor (TES) bolometers. Each multichroic pixel on a…

Silicon photonic wavefront phase-tilt sensors for wavefront monitoring using surface coupling grating arrays are demonstrated. The first design employs the intrinsic angle dependence of the grating coupling efficiency to determine local…

The recent introduction of coherent optical communications has created a compelling need for ultra-fast phase-sensitive measurement techniques operating at milliwatt peak power levels and in time scales ranging from sub-picoseconds to…

Aims. As part of the ongoing GRAVITY+ upgrade of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer infrastructure, we aim to improve the performance of the GRAVITY Fringe-Tracker, and to enable its use by other instruments. Methods. We modify the…

We present the latest update of the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope interferometer (VLTI). The operations of VLTI have greatly improved in the past years: reduction of the execution time; better offering of telescopes…

Visibility estimators and their performance are presented for use with the Palomar Testbed Interferometer (PTI). One operational mode of PTI is single-baseline visibility measurement using pathlength modulation with synchronous readout by a…

We present SPIFFI, the integral field spectrometer for the VLT. This instrument allows simultaneous observation of infrared spectra in more than 1000 image points of a two dimensional field. With its set of four gratings and a pixel scale…

The receiver N3AR operating at a frequency range between 67 and 116 GHz has been commissioned at the APEX telescope in October 2024. This adds a new low-frequency band for APEX, with the capability of simultaneous dual-frequency…

Focal plane wavefront sensing and control is a critical approach to reducing non-common path errors between the a conventional astronomical adaptive optics (AO) wavefront sensor (WFS) detector and science camera. However, in addition to…

This paper is the third part of a trilogy dealing with the principles, performance and limitations of what I named "Telescope-Interferometers" (TIs). The basic idea consists in transforming one telescope into a Wavefront Error (WFE) sensing…

The VLTI instrument GRAVITY will provide very powerful astrometry by combining the light from four telescopes for two objects simultaneously. It will measure the angular separation between the two astronomical objects to a precision of 10…

The combination of high spatial and spectral resolution in optical astronomy enables new observational approaches to many open problems in stellar and circumstellar astrophysics. However, constructing a high-resolution spectrograph for an…

The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI) can perform Fizeau interferometry in the focal plane, which accesses spatial information out to the LBT's full 22.7-m edge-to-edge baseline. This mode has previously been used to obtain…

Until now, the detailed interpretation of the observed microlensing events has suffered from the fact that the physical parameters of the phenomenon cannot be uniquely determined from the available astronomical measurements, i.e. the…