Asgard/NOTT: cryogenic characterization of the mid-infrared photonic chip

Le résumé fourni par la source

Asgard/NOTT is the first long-baseline nulling interferometer that will be operational in the southern hemisphere. It is an L’-band (3.5-4µm) instrument optimized to characterize hot exozodiacal dust and young giant planets orbiting around the snowline of nearby main-sequence stars. NOTT uses a photonic beam combiner made of Gallium Lanthanum Sulfide (GLS), manufactured at Macquarie University and characterized at ambient temperatures at Universität zu Köln. Using the test bench of the NOTT instrument assembled at KU Leuven, and its test cryostat, we successfully cooled the chip down to ~140K and performed its first cryogenic characterization. The results show that the GLS photonic chip behaves as expected at cryogenic temperatures. We investigate an anti-reflection coating to reduce its Fresnel losses and increase its throughput to ~50%, and we test the coating’s resistance at cryogenic temperature

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.