The current work presents a fiber coupling tip-tilt controller developed for a three-telescope experimental prototype of an Astronomical Fiber-Based Near-Infrared Heterodyne Interferometer. It is based on a commercial magneto-mechanical compact-disk laser-beam actuator on which the fiber-ferrule is mounted. The actuator is driven by a two-axis controller electronics board which was developed by us based on digital processing in a dsPIC33EP device with analog periphery, which reads the quad-photodiode signals amplified by 109, and drives the actuator with two high-current outputs. While this realizes the very fine and relatively fast (up to 100 Hz) fiber-position control in the telescope focus, as a basis to this, a relatively coarse and slow auto-guiding is given by an amateur guiding camera. During first optical bench testing we obtained an average coupled power increase of up to 50% under certain perturbations.
We present the concept and experimental development of a low-cost near-infrared heterodyne interferometer prototype based on commercial 1.55 μm fiber components. As the most crucial component of it we characterized a novel sub-shot noise correlation detection system. We are upgrading to a Reconfigurable Open Architecture Computing Hardware, 2nd Generation (ROACH-2) board with the capacity of four parallel 1.25 GHz bandwidth digitization, so that phase closure measurements will be possible. We extended the stabilization of the local oscillator phase between the telescopes to cover the whole acoustic range. For the telescope to single-mode fiber coupling under atmospheric perturbation, we developed a fiber actuator lock-loop for small telescopes and good seeing, and tested an adaptive optics approach for mediocre seeing and/or larger telescopes. We constructed also a frequency comb based laser synthesizer system to include tests on multi-frequency band measurements towards ultra-broad band dispersed" heterodyne detection systems finally useful for the Planet Formation Imager (PFI).
We present concept and first experimental lab results for a low-cost near-infrared heterodyne interferometer based on commercial 1.55μm fiber components with relative phase-stabilization between both telescopes. After a demonstration with 14”-telescopes, the concept should be upgradable to larger numbers of mid- or large-class telescopes. Given that the employed fiber phase stabilization scheme should enable the operation of long baselines, we discuss the applicability of this concept for long-baseline, high telescope number systems (scalability of the concept) and mid-infrared wavelengths. This could finally result in contributions to the design of the large infrared Planet Formation Imager which is being proposed currently.
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