Towards Laser-Guide-Stars for Multi-Aperture Interferometry: an application to the Hypertelescope

摘要

Optical interferometry has been successful at achieving milliarcsecondresolution on bright stars. Imaging performance can improve greatly byincreasing the number of baselines, which has motivated proposals to buildlarge (~ 100 m) optical interferometers with tens to hundreds of telescopes. Itis also desirable to adaptively correct atmospheric turbulence to obtain directphased images of astrophysical sources. When a natural guide star is notavailable, we investigate the feasibility of using a modified laser-guide-startechnique that is suitable for large diluted apertures. The method consists ofusing sub-sets of apertures to create an array of artificial stars in thesodium layer and collecting back-scattered light with the same sub-apertures.We present some numerical and laboratory simulations that quantify therequirements and sensitivity of the technique.