Related papers: The Importance of Phase in Nulling Interferometry …
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…
We provide a complete theory of the phase closure of a binary system in which a small, feeble, and unresolved companion acts as a perturbing parameter on the spatial frequency spectrum of a dominant, bright, resolved source. We demonstrate…
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…
Direct detection of a planet around a star in the mid-IR, requires a nulling interferometer featuring an achromatic phase shift of pi on broad range. A new concept for designing such an achromatic phase shifter is presented here. The major…
One of the biggest challenges associated with a nulling interferometer-based approach to detecting extra-solar Earth-like planets comes from the extremely stringent requirements of pathlength, polarization and amplitude matching in the…
Understanding exoplanet formation and finding potentially habitable exoplanets is vital to an enhanced understanding of the universe. The use of nulling interferometry to strongly attenuate the central starlight provides the opportunity to…
(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…
We explore the sensitivity and completeness of long baseline interferometric observations for detecting unknown, faint companions around bright unresolved stars. We derive a linear expression for the closure phase signature of a faint…
The number of terrestrial exoplanets accessible to high-contrast coronagraphic imaging with large telescopes is limited by the smallest angular offset from bright stars at which coronagraphs can observe. However, it is possible to reach…
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…
Fringe tracking in interferometers is typically analyzed with the implicit assumption that there is a single phase associated with each telescope in the array. If the telescopes have apertures significantly larger than r0 and only partial…
Nulling interferometry aims to detect faint objects close to bright stars. Its principle is to produce a destructive interference along the line-of-sight so that the stellar flux is rejected, while the flux of the off-axis source can be…
We describe the fringe packet tracking system used to equalise the optical path lengths at the Infrared Optical Telescope Array (IOTA) interferometer. The measurement of closure phases requires obtaining fringes on three baselines…
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…
Aims: Optical interferometry from space for the purpose of detecting and characterising exoplanets is seeing a revival, specifically from missions such as the proposed Large Interferometer For Exoplanets (LIFE). A default assumption since…
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…
This paper deals with the theoretical principle and optical design of a phase-shifting telescope-interferometer. What is called a "Telescope-Interferometer" (T-I) is indeed a novel, recently proposed Wavefront Error (WFE) sensing technique,…
The use of interferometric nulling for the direct characterization of extrasolar planets is an exciting prospect, but one that faces many practical challenges when deployed on telescopes. The largest limitation is the extreme sensitivity of…
The nulling interferometers proposed to study planets around other stars are generally well suited for studying small-scale structures surrounding other bright pointlike objects such as the nuclei of active galaxies. Conventional…
Nulling interferometry is one of the most promising technologies for imaging exoplanets within stellar habitable zones. The use of photonics for carrying out nulling interferometry enables the contrast and separation required for exoplanet…