Speaker: Daniel Mortimer (MPIA)

Date: Thursday 26 October 2023

Time: 14:00

Location: Online (Zoom)

Optical interferometry, when a 40 metre telescope isn’t big enough

Long baseline optical interferometry is a technique which enables observations of the night sky with milliarcsecond spatial resolution, by coherently combining the light from telescopes hundreds of meters apart. Due to the short wavelengths of optical light, the beams of starlight must be brought together and physically combined, with the path length from the telescopes having to be controlled to around one part in a billion. This leads to a number of challenges when building an interferometer. In this talk I will give an overview the instrumentation that makes an optical interferometer work. In particular I will focus on the beam combiners (the instrument which interferes the beams of starlight and records the resulting interference fringes) I have been involved in developing, highlighting the unique science they are capable of. These include the J/H/K band FOURIER combiner for the MROI, the H/K band MIRC-X/MYSTIC combiners at the CHARA array and the J/H band BIFROST combiner for the VLTI.