Optical long baseline intensity interferometry: prospects for stellar physics

TL;DR

This paper discusses recent advances and future prospects of optical intensity interferometry for high-resolution stellar observations, including successful measurements and potential improvements using existing telescope arrays.

Contribution

It reports a successful measurement of intensity correlation in bright stars with small telescopes and proposes extending this method to larger telescope arrays for improved stellar imaging.

Findings

Successful detection of intensity bunching in bright stars

Potential to adapt the method to large telescope arrays

Discussion of improvements for spatial interferometry

Abstract

More than sixty years after the first intensity correlation experiments by Hanbury Brown and Twiss, there is renewed interest for intensity interferometry techniques for high angular resolution studies of celestial sources. We report on a successful attempt to measure the bunching peak in the intensity correlation function for bright stellar sources with 1 meter telescopes (I2C project). We propose further improvements of our preliminary experiments of spatial interferometry between two 1 m telescopes, and discuss the possibility to export our method to existing large arrays of telescopes.