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Outdoor fibre link between two telescopes and the lab of the CHARA array at 810 nm. Demonstration of the optical path servo control

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Abstract

In the framework of the ALOHA (Astronomical Light Optical Hybrid Analysis) project, dedicated to high resolution imaging in the L-band using optical fibre and nonlinear optics, we have implemented a servo controlled hectometric outdoor fibre link between two telescopes and the recombination beam facility of the CHARA telescope array. A two-stage servo system using optical fibre modulator, fibre delay line, and a metrology laser at 1064 nm allows to stabilise the optical path difference within 3 nm RMS over a 3000 s record. Using an internal source at 810 nm, the signal-to-noise ratio of the fringe modulation peak is enhanced by a factor better than two when the servo control is switched on. This study can be also considered as a seminal work towards very long base fibre linked telescope arrays and allows to scale the perturbative environment of an outdoor fibre link.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), Thales Alenia Space and the Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers (INSU). We would also like to thank the entire CHARA team for the help and support they gave us during the mission at CHARA.

Funding

This work has been financially supported by the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), Thales Alenia Space and the Institut National des Sciences de l’Univers (INSU).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Univ. Limoges, CNRS, XLIM, UMR 7252, 123 Avenue Albert Thomas, Limoges, 87000, France

    Magri Julie, Grossard Ludovic, Reynaud François, Fabert Marc & Delage Laurent

  2. Thales Alenia Space, Observation Exploration & Navigation, 5 Allée des Gabians BP 99, Cannes La Bocca Cedex, 06156, France

    Krawczyk Rodolphe

  3. CNES, Centre Spatial de Toulouse, Service DSO/SI/OP, 18 avenue Edouard Belin, Toulouse Cedex 09, 31401, France

    Le Duigou Jean-Michel

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  1. Magri Julie
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  2. Grossard Ludovic
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  3. Reynaud François
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Contributions

\(\bullet \) Funding acquisition: Grossard Ludovic, Reynaud François, Krawczyk Rodolphe, Le Duigou Jean-Michel.

\(\bullet \) Experimental implementation and data collection: Magri Julie, Grossard Ludovic, Reynaud François, Fabert Marc.

\(\bullet \) Writing - original draft preparation: Reynaud François.

\(\bullet \) Writing - review and editing: Magri Julie, Grossard Ludovic, Reynaud François, Fabert Marc, Delage Laurent.

\(\bullet \) Supervision: Krawczyk Rodolphe, Le Duigou Jean-Michel.

All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Grossard Ludovic.

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Julie, M., Ludovic, G., François, R. et al. Outdoor fibre link between two telescopes and the lab of the CHARA array at 810 nm. Demonstration of the optical path servo control. Exp Astron 57, 13 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-024-09935-x

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