Engineering topics

Vintskevich, Stephen

Publications and source records attributed to Vintskevich, Stephen.

2 records

DOE OSTI2023

Towards quantum telescopes: demonstration of a two-photon interferometer for precision astrometry

Classical optical interferometry requires maintaining live, phase-stable links between telescope stations. This requirement greatly adds to the cost of extending to long baseline separations and limits on baselines will in turn limit the achievable angular resolution. Here we describe a novel type of two-photon interferometer for astrometry, which uses photons from two separate sky sources and does not require an optical link between stations. Such techniques may make large increases in interferometric baselines practical, even by orders of magnitude, with a corresponding improvement in astrometric precision benefiting numerous fields in astrophysics. We tested a benchtop analogue version of the two-source interferometer and unambiguously observe correlated behavior in detections of photon pairs from two thermal light sources, in agreement with theoretical predictions. This work opens new possibilities in future astronomical measurements.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

DOE OSTI2023

Astrometry in two-photon interferometry using an Earth rotation fringe scan

Optical interferometers may not require a phase-stable optical link between the stations if instead sources of quantum-mechanically entangled pairs could be provided to them, enabling long baselines. We developed a new variation of this idea, proposing that photons from two different astronomical sources could be interfered at two decoupled stations. Interference products can then be calculated in post-processing or requiring only a slow, classical connection between stations. In this work, we investigated practical feasibility of this approach. We developed a Bayesian analysis method for the earth rotation fringe scanning technique and showed that in the limit of high signal-to-noise ratio it reproduced the results from a simple Fisher matrix analysis. Here we identify candidate stair pairs in the northern hemisphere, where this technique could be applied. With two telescopes with an effective collecting area of ~ 2 m 2 , we could detect fringing and measure the astrometric separation of the sources at ~100 μas precision in a few hours of observations, in agreement with previous estimates.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗