Quantum astronomy with Iqueye

I. Capraro; C. Barbieri; G. Naletto; T. Occhipinti; E. Verroi; P. Zoccarato; S. Gradari

doi:10.1117/12.849542

16 April 2010 Quantum astronomy with Iqueye

I. Capraro, C. Barbieri, G. Naletto, T. Occhipinti, E. Verroi, P. Zoccarato, S. Gradari

Proceedings Volume 7702, Quantum Information and Computation VIII; 77020M (2010) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.849542
Event: SPIE Defense, Security, and Sensing, 2010, Orlando, Florida, United States

Abstract

Iqueye is a high speed astronomical photon counting device, tested at the ESO 3.5 m New Technology Telescope in La Silla (Chile). The optics splits the telescope pupil into four portions each feeding a Single Photon Avalanche Diode. A time-to-digital converter board time tags the pulses from the 4 channels, and the times sent to a storage device. The instrument is capable of running continuously up to a rate of 8 MHz, with an absolute rms accuracy better that 0.5 ns. The time is obtained by means of a rubidium clock referenced to UTC through the GPS signal. The paper describes the analysis performed on data taken on bright stars in order to perform 'quantum-like' measurements in the photon stream, namely the calculation of the second-order correlation functions g⁽²⁾(x,0) and g⁽²⁾(0,t). To this end, an ad hoc software correlator has been developed. Taking advantage of the pupil-splitting concept, the calculation of g(2)(x,0) has been made between the sub-apertures of the telescope, as a first step to verify the zero-baseline correlation coefficient in an Hanbury-Brown Twiss intensity interferometer [1]. Our experiment demonstrates the value of an Iqueye-like instrument applied to larger telescopes, like the four 8 m VLTs or the two 10m Keck telescopes, and even more the sub-pupils of the future 42 m E-ELT for a novel exploitation of the photon stream from celestial objects.

Citation Download Citation

I. Capraro, C. Barbieri, G. Naletto, T. Occhipinti, E. Verroi, P. Zoccarato, and S. Gradari "Quantum astronomy with Iqueye", Proc. SPIE 7702, Quantum Information and Computation VIII, 77020M (16 April 2010); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.849542

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