Beam combiner for the Asgard/BIFROST instrument
Daniel J. Mortimer, Sorabh Chhabra, Stefan Kraus, Narsireddy Anugu,, Romain Laugier, Jean-Baptiste Le Bouquin, John D. Monnier

TL;DR
BIFROST is a planned high-resolution, short-wavelength beam combiner for the VLT Interferometer, designed to enhance spatial and spectral observations with innovative beam combination schemes.
Contribution
This paper presents the design and comparison of two beam combination schemes for BIFROST, a new instrument for high-resolution interferometric observations.
Findings
Comparison of AIO and IO beam combination schemes
Analysis of sensitivity and implementation challenges
Design considerations for high spectral resolution observations
Abstract
BIFROST will be a short-wavelength ( = 1.0 - 1.7m) beam combiner for the VLT Interferometer, combining both high spatial (/2B = 0.8 mas) and spectral (up to R = 25,000) resolution. It will be part of the Asgard Suite of visitor instruments. The new window of high spectral resolution, short wavelength observations brings with it new challenges. Here we outline the instrumental design of BIFROST, highlighting which beam combiner subsystems are required and why. This is followed by a comparison All-In-One (AIO) beam combination scheme and an Integrated Optics (IO) scheme with ABCD modulation both in terms of expected sensitivity and the practical implementation of each system.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsAdaptive optics and wavefront sensing · Spectroscopy and Laser Applications · Astronomy and Astrophysical Research
