English

Astrometry in two-photon interferometry using Earth rotation fringe scan

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics 2023-02-01 v3 Quantum Physics

Abstract

Optical interferometers may not require a phase-stable optical link between the stations if instead sources of quantum-mechanically entangled pairs could be provided to them, enabling long baselines. We developed a new variation of this idea, proposing that photons from two different astronomical sources could be interfered at two decoupled stations. Interference products can then be calculated in post-processing or requiring only a slow, classical connection between stations. In this work, we investigated practical feasibility of this approach. We developed a Bayesian analysis method for the earth rotation fringe scanning technique and showed that in the limit of high signal-to-noise ratio it reproduced the results from a simple Fisher matrix analysis. We identify candidate stair pairs in the northern hemisphere, where this technique could be applied. With two telescopes with an effective collecting area of 2\sim 2 m2^2, we could detect fringing and measure the astrometric separation of the sources at 10μ\sim 10\,\muas precision in a few hours of observations, in agreement with previous estimates.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.09091,
  title  = {Astrometry in two-photon interferometry using Earth rotation fringe scan},
  author = {Zhi Chen and Andrei Nomerotski and Anže Slosar and Paul Stankus and Stephen Vintskevich},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.09091},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

Currently accepted to PRD

R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:21:24.755Z