Colloque APC : “Spectroscopic Count Intensity Interferometry with Extremely Large Telescopes”

Le laboratoire APC est heureux d’accueillir Albert Stebbins (Fermilab) vendredi cette semaine. Al a aimablement accepté de donner un colloque intitulé “Spectroscopic Count Intensity Interferometry with Extremely Large Telescopes” (résumé ci-dessous), en 454A à 11h le vendredi 26 octobre.

Title: Optical Intensity Interferometry (Hanbury Brown Twiss) is an astronomical imaging technique that was used to make the first direct measurement of stellar diameters. The technique was abandoned in favor of amplitude interferometry decades ago, however amplitude interferometry is not practical for very long baselines which limits its angular resolution.  Two modern technical developments, the construction of three 30 meter telescopes and extremely fast (picosecond) photon counters, should cause a revival of Intensity Interferometry.   This will allow (crude) optical imaging with nano-arcsecond resolution.  Targets to be imaged include not only stars but also supermassive black holes at cosmological distances and micro-quasars in our Galaxy as well as time dependent phenomena such as kilonovae and the Crab optical pulsar