Research Areas - (1) Photonic Nulling Interferometry and Aperture Masking (GLINT)

Full path: Astronomy / Astrophysics > Astronomical Instrumentation > Optical / IR Astronomical Instrumentation > Photonic Nulling Interferometry and Aperture Masking (GLINT)

Department(s)/lab(s): School of Physics / Sydney Institute for Astronomy | Tuthill High Angular Resolution Group @ USyd
Summary:

Tuthill is the world's leading practitioner of aperture-masking interferometry and its modern photonic successors. His group's instruments — GLINT (a photonic nuller that destructively interferes starlight on a chip), Dragonfly, and the kernel-phase analysis framework — exist to recover structure at and below the formal diffraction limit of the telescope, in the photon-starved, speckle-dominated regime where naive imaging fails. Science targets are the dusty pinwheel nebulae of Wolf-Rayet binaries, protoplanetary discs and direct detection of exoplanets. Positioned against the established body of NV-ensemble quantum sensing work — DEER, nanoscale NMR and T1 relaxometry protocols operating at pT/sqrt(Hz) field sensitivity — this is the astronomy entry in the search that most closely mirrors the intellectual structure of quantum sensing: the instrument's performance is set by a fundamental noise floor (photon and speckle noise, analogous to the shot-noise floor at pT/sqrt(Hz)), and the entire game is designing an estimator and a hardware front end that saturate it. Preferred attribute strongly present.