On Lab Test of Coherence in Event Horizon Imager

Event horizon imaging requires a third-generation space Very Long Baseline Interferometer on a 500 GHz band. The interferometer challenges available frequency standards. Namely, the practical coherent integration time is about 45 times shorter than needed. A self-calibration could aid this though a 3rd satellite is needed hence, an increased mission cost. This paper is devoted to experimental verification of a novel concept for two-way frequency transfer.We built a dedicated breadboard, test set-up, and run tests with and without temperature differences between branches of the breadboard. A phase difference between derived oscillators is the white noise-like function of the time with 1-σ of 0.5° at 103.2 GHz over more than 3 hours. Varying the temperature difference between branches ±3 C during 4.5 hours, being the orbit period, confirmed that the phase difference is the function of this temperature difference too. The Allan Deviation demonstrated between two derived 103.2 GHz oscillators is of 1.1×10−14/τ over 10 ms < τ < 1000 s, where τ is the averaging time, and the optical communication link path length is 5 km (17 ms). Degradation of this Allan Deviation is of 2 times at the longest-possible delay of 0.2 s in the interferometer system; the 0.2 s is the biggest sum of geometric and communication delays. This worst-case satisfies the requirement with a margin of 11 times. An obtained coherence is in the range of 0.997−0.9998 which is beneficial for the interferometer, at 557 GHz. This is one of the key technology enablers for black hole imaging from space.