Related papers: An analysis of stellar interferometers as wavefron…
The mission of NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) is to find Earth-like planets orbiting other stars and characterize the atmospheres of these planets using spectroscopy. Because of the enormous brightness ratio between the star and the…
Due to turbulence in the atmosphere images taken from ground-based telescopes become distorted. With adaptive optics (AO) images can be given greater clarity allowing for better observations with existing telescopes and are essential for…
By providing sensitive sub-arcsecond images and integral field spectroscopy in the 25 - 400 micron wavelength range, a far-IR interferometer will revolutionize our understanding of planetary system formation, reveal otherwise-undetectable…
High-contrast imaging systems using active control with adaptive optics (AO) are often limited by non-common path (NCP) aberrations that are seen only at the final science image. AO systems employing focal-plane wavefront sensors (FP-WFSs)…
Using kilometric arrays of air Cherenkov telescopes, intensity interferometry may increase the spatial resolution in optical astronomy by an order of magnitude, enabling images of rapidly rotating stars with structures in their…
Space-based gravitational wave observatories, such as LISA, Taiji, and TianQin, employ long-baseline laser interferometry, necessitating displacement measurement sensitivity at 1 pm/$\sqrt{Hz}$ level. A significant challenge in achieving…
Optical interferometry provides us with a unique opportunity to improve our understanding of stellar structure and evolution. Through direct observation of rotationally distorted photospheres at sub-milliarcsecond scales, we are now able to…
High-contrast imaging has been used to discover and characterize dozens of exoplanets to date. The primary limiting performance factor for these instruments is contrast, the ratio of exoplanet to host star brightness that an instrument can…
We show that it is possible to image the structure of a distant quasar on scales of $\sim 1\,$AU by constructing a telescope which uses a nearby dwarf star as its ``primary lens'' together with a satellite-borne ``secondary''. The image…
The techniques of laser cooling combined with atom interferometry make possible the realization of very sensitive and accurate inertial sensors like gyroscopes or accelerometers. Besides earth-based developments, the use of these techniques…
Baseline calibration of a stellar interferometer is a prerequisite to data reduction of astrometric operations. This technique of astrometry is triangulation of star positions. Since angles are deduced from the baseline and delay side of…
This paper introduces an analytical method to calculate segment-level wavefront error tolerances in order to enable the detection of faint extra-solar planets using segmented telescopes in space. This study provides a full treatment of…
The direct detection of gravitational waves by ground-based optical interferometers has opened a new window in astronomy. Nevertheless, as these detectors are a combination of two Michelson-Morley like baselines, their sensitivity for…
The current generation of ground-based coronagraphic instruments uses deformable mirrors to correct for phase errors and to improve contrast levels at small angular separations. Improving these techniques, several space and ground based…
We extend our previous demonstration of the first on-sky primary mirror segment closed-loop control on Keck using a vector-Zernike wavefront sensor (vZWFS), which improved the Strehl ratio on the NIRC2 science camera by up to 10 percentage…
The surfaces of rotating stars serve as a window into their interiors, magnetic dynamos, and are important in other areas including exoplanet discovery and atmospheric characterization. While indirect techniques such as photometry and…
We show that distances of objects at cosmological distances can be measured directly using interferometry. Our approach to interferometric parallax comes from analysis of 4-point amplitude and intensity correlations that can be generated…
The aberrations induced by the sample and/or by the sample holder limit the resolution of optical microscopes. Wavefront correction can be achieved using a deformable mirror with wavefront sensorless optimization algorithms but, despite the…
With its high sensitivity, the Pyramid wavefront sensor (PyWFS) is becoming an advantageous sensor for astronomical adaptive optics (AO) systems. However, this sensor exhibits significant non-linear behaviours leading to challenging AO…
We describe a technique for measuring focus errors in a cryogenic, wide-field, near-infrared space telescope. The measurements are made with a collimator looking through a large vacuum window, with a reflective cold filter to reduce…