title: Simple beam combination for stellar interferometry.
abstract: In stellar interferometry, image quality improves significantly with the inclusion of more telescopes and the use of phase closure. We demonstrate, using first coherent and then partially coherent white light, a compact and efficient pairwise combination of 12 or more beams. The input beams are lined up and spread through a cylindrical lens into a comb of parallel ellipses, which interferes with a perpendicular copy of itself to form a matrix of interferograms between all pairs. The diagonal elements show interference of each beam with itself, for intensity calibration. The measured white-light visibilities were high and stable.
authors.affiliation: Physics Department, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel. eribak@physics.technion.ac.il
authors.forename: E N
authors.initials: EN
authors.lastname: Ribak
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Gai
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Loreggia
authors.forename: S G
authors.initials: SG
authors.lastname: Lipson