Brady, David J. (ORCID:0000000156552478)

Interferometric focal planes

We propose arrays of integrated interferometers to characterize the mutual intensity on focal planes. While focal coherence measurement does not increase the aperture-limited spatial bandpass, it can increase Shannon information capacity relative to irradiance measurement by increasing the number of degrees of freedom per Nyquist sample. We describe a sampling model for interferometric measurement using arrays of 2-port Mach-Zehnder interferometers and show within this model that interferometric focal planes enable more accurate estimation of prototypical scene parameters.