The FLUOR Astronomical Beam Combiner

Trivia
Pictures

Trivia

The Fiber Linked Unit for Optical Recombination is an interferometric beam combiner for 2 near-infrared telescopes. It combines light in the near infrared (astronomical K band, wavelengths from 1.9 to 2.4 microns). Its main characteristics are:

The use of single mode fibers for spatial filtering.
The use of fiber couplers for the optical recombination.
Simultaneous photometric outputs.
Pupil plane recombination (i.e. time encoding of the interferometric fringes)

This instrument results from experiments using single mode fibers back in 1991 (V. Coudé du Foresto, J.-M. Mariotti and P.Léna at Paris Observatory / Le Verre Fluoré). It became an astronomical instrument a few years latter, first used at Kitt Peak, then at the IOTA telescope array between 1995 and 2002. After a lot of succesfull astrophysical results obtained with IOTA/FLUOR, it has been decided to move FLUOR to the CHARA Array, in order to access larger telescope separations. FLUOR is also the precursor or the test instrument VINCI of the ESO Very Large Telescope in its interferometric mode.

The latest publication describing the instrument can be found here (2006 SPIE paper).

For the most recent astrophysical results obtained by FLUOR at the CHARA Array, see my publication web page.

Pictures

Schematic overview	Picture Overview, as of 2005
FLUOR fringes (left) and their Fourier Transform (left)	Some recent results: Vega as seen by FLUOR. Click on pictures to see the corresponding press release. Publications: Absil et al. (2006) and Aufdenberg et al. (2006)