1. Single-mode waveguides for GRAVITY II. Single-mode fibers and Fiber Control Unit
- Author
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Perrin, G., Jocou, L., Perraut, K., Berger, J. Ph., Dembet, R., Fédou, P., Lacour, S., Chapron, F., Collin, C., Poulain, S., Cardin, V., Joulain, F., Eisenhauer, F., Haubois, X., Gillessen, S., Haug, M., Hausmann, F., Kervella, P., Léna, P., Lippa, M., Pfuh, O., Rabien, S., Amorim, A., Brandner, W., and Straubmeier, C.
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Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics - Abstract
The 2nd generation VLTI instrument GRAVITY is a two-field infrared interferometer operating in the K band between 1.97 and 2.43 $\mu$m with either the four 8 m or the four 1.8 m telescopes of the Very Large Telescope (VLT). Beams collected by the telescopes are corrected with adaptive optics systems and the fringes are stabilized with a fringe-tracking system. A metrology system allows the measurement of internal path lengths in order to achieve high-accuracy astrometry. High sensitivity and high interferometric accuracy are achieved thanks to (i) correction of the turbulent phase, (ii) the use of low-noise detectors, and (iii) the optimization of photometric and coherence throughput. Beam combination and most of the beam transport are performed with single-mode waveguides in vacuum and at low temperature. In this paper, we present the functions and performance achieved with weakly birefringent standard single-mode fiber systems in GRAVITY. Fibered differential delay lines (FDDLs) are used to dynamically compensate for up to 6 mm of delay between the science and reference targets. Fibered polarization rotators allow us to align polarizations in the instrument and make the single-mode beam combiner close to polarization neutral. The single-mode fiber system exhibits very low birefringence (less than 23{\deg}), very low attenuation (3.6-7 dB/km across the K band), and optimized differential dispersion (less than 2.04 $\mu$rad cm2 at zero extension of the FDDLs). As a consequence, the typical fringe contrast losses due to the single-mode fibers are 6% to 10% in the lowest-resolution mode and 5% in the medium- and high-resolution modes of the instrument for a photometric throughput of the fiber chain of the order of 90%. There is no equivalent of this fiber system to route and modally filter beams with delay and polarization control in any other K-band beamcombiner., Comment: 14 pages including 2 appendices, 8 figures in the main text plus 2 figures in the appendices, final version published in A&A
- Published
- 2024
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