Astrometry in two-photon interferometry using Earth rotation fringe scan

Abstract

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. We identify candidate stair pairs in the northern hemisphere, where this technique could be applied. With two telescopes with an effective collecting area of $\sim 2$ m${}^2$, we could detect fringing and measure the astrometric separation of the sources at $\sim 10\mu$as precision in a few hours of observations, in agreement with previous estimates.

Currently accepted to PRD

References in corpus (6)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. IV. Imaging the Central Supermassive Black Hole
• Demonstration of stellar intensity interferometry with the four VERITAS telescopes
• Precision Astrometry with Adaptive Optics
• A quantitative comparison of amplitude versus intensity interferometry for astronomy
• Two-photon amplitude interferometry for precision astrometry

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Towards Quantum Telescopes: Demonstration of a Two-Photon Interferometer for Quantum-Assisted Astronomy
• Probing $H_0$ and resolving AGN disks with ultrafast photon counters
• Superresolution imaging with entanglement-enhanced telescopy
• Quantum-inspired exoplanet detection in the presence of experimental imperfections
• Quantum resolution limit of long-baseline imaging using distributed entanglement