Jewel Optics I: non-redundant Fizeau beam combination without the guilt

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Taras, Adam K., Piroscia, Grace, Tuthill, Peter
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Taras, Adam K.
Piroscia, Grace
Tuthill, Peter
author_facet Taras, Adam K.
Piroscia, Grace
Tuthill, Peter
contents The enduring technique of aperture masking interferometry, now more than 150 years old, is still widely practised today for it opens a window of high angular resolution astronomy that remains difficult to access by any competing technology. However, the requirement to apodise the pupil into a non-redundant array dramatically limits the throughput, typically to $\sim$10\% or less. This in turn has a dramatic impact on sensitivity, limiting observational reach to only bright science targets. This paper presents "Jewel Optics", a technology that leverages the gains in signal fidelity conferred by non-redundant Fizeau beam combination without the sensitivity penalty incurred by traditional aperture masks. Our approach fragments the pupil into several sets of sparse-array non-redundant patterns, each of which is encoded onto a unique phase wedge. After extensive searching, solutions could be found where all individual sets are fully non-redundant while fully tiling the available area of the input pupil. Each pattern is assigned a common phase wedge which diverts light from those sub-apertures onto a unique, defined region of the detector. We demonstrate a prototype designed for use in the VAMPIRES instrument at the Subaru telescope and find excellent agreement between the design and lab results. We discuss a design refinement for producing fully achromatic Jewel Optics, and finally we highlight the potential for future work with these optical components.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_01570
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle Jewel Optics I: non-redundant Fizeau beam combination without the guilt
Taras, Adam K.
Piroscia, Grace
Tuthill, Peter
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
The enduring technique of aperture masking interferometry, now more than 150 years old, is still widely practised today for it opens a window of high angular resolution astronomy that remains difficult to access by any competing technology. However, the requirement to apodise the pupil into a non-redundant array dramatically limits the throughput, typically to $\sim$10\% or less. This in turn has a dramatic impact on sensitivity, limiting observational reach to only bright science targets. This paper presents "Jewel Optics", a technology that leverages the gains in signal fidelity conferred by non-redundant Fizeau beam combination without the sensitivity penalty incurred by traditional aperture masks. Our approach fragments the pupil into several sets of sparse-array non-redundant patterns, each of which is encoded onto a unique phase wedge. After extensive searching, solutions could be found where all individual sets are fully non-redundant while fully tiling the available area of the input pupil. Each pattern is assigned a common phase wedge which diverts light from those sub-apertures onto a unique, defined region of the detector. We demonstrate a prototype designed for use in the VAMPIRES instrument at the Subaru telescope and find excellent agreement between the design and lab results. We discuss a design refinement for producing fully achromatic Jewel Optics, and finally we highlight the potential for future work with these optical components.
title Jewel Optics I: non-redundant Fizeau beam combination without the guilt
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01570