Issue |
A&A
Volume 639, July 2020
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A53 | |
Number of page(s) | 7 | |
Section | Astronomical instrumentation | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201937368 | |
Published online | 06 July 2020 |
Toward a large bandwidth photonic correlator for infrared heterodyne interferometry
A first laboratory proof of concept
1
Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IPAG, 38000 Grenoble, France
e-mail: guillaume.bourdarot@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
2
Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, LIPHY, 38000 Grenoble, France
Received:
19
December
2019
Accepted:
17
May
2020
Context. Infrared heterodyne interferometry has been proposed as a practical alternative for recombining a large number of telescopes over kilometric baselines in the mid-infrared. However, the current limited correlation capacities impose strong restrictions on the sensitivity of this appealing technique.
Aims. In this paper, we propose to address the problem of transport and correlation of wide-bandwidth signals over kilometric distances by introducing photonic processing in infrared heterodyne interferometry.
Methods. We describe the architecture of a photonic double-sideband correlator for two telescopes, along with the experimental demonstration of this concept on a proof-of-principle test bed.
Results. We demonstrate the a posteriori correlation of two infrared signals previously generated on a two-telescope simulator in a double-sideband photonic correlator. A degradation of the signal-to-noise ratio of 13%, equivalent to a noise factor NF = 1.15, is obtained through the correlator, and the temporal coherence properties of our input signals are retrieved from these measurements.
Conclusions. Our results demonstrate that photonic processing can be used to correlate heterodyne signals with a potentially large increase of detection bandwidth. These developments open the way to photonic processing of wide bandwidth signals for mid-infrared heterodyne interferometry, in particular for a large number of telescopes and for direct imager recombiners.
Key words: instrumentation: interferometers / techniques: high angular resolution / techniques: interferometric
© G. Bourdarot et al. 2020
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.