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Published March 1991 | Published
Journal Article Open

Noise in optical synthesis images. II. Sensitivity of an ^nC_2 interferometer with bispectrum imaging

Abstract

We study the imaging sensitivity of a ground-based optical array of n apertures in which the beams are combined pairwise, as in radio-interferometric arrays, onto n(n - 1)/2 detectors, the so-called ^nC_2 interferometer. Groundbased operation forces the use of the fringe power and the bispectrum phasor as the primary observables rather than the simpler and superior observable, the Michelson fringe phasor. At high photon rates we find that bispectral imaging suffers no loss of sensitivity compared with an ideal array (space based) that directly uses the Michelson fringe phasor. In the opposite limit, when the number of photons per spatial coherence area per coherence time drops below unity, the sensitivity of the array drops rapidly relative to an ideal array. In this regime the sensitivity is independent of n, and hence it may be efficient to have many smaller arrays, each operating separately and simultaneously.

Additional Information

© 1991 Optical Society of America. Received April 9, 1990; accepted September 17, 1990. Shrinivas R. Kulkarni gratefully acknowledges financial support from the W. M. Keck Foundation. The research of Sudhakar Prasad was supported partially by the Sandia National Laboratories under a Sandia University Research Program contract. Shrinivas R. Kulkarni is a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. Tadashi Nakajima holds a Center for Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship. We are grateful to Chris Haniff for several animated discussions on the virtues of self-calculation. We thank Andrea Ghez for a careful reading of the manuscript. We thank the two referees for sharpening up some of the discussion in the paper.

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