In this new study, led by PhD candidate Romain Laugier, our team has looked into what one needs to do in order to build a kernel-nuller, that is a high-contrast interferometric recombiner robust to residual piston excursions, for an array featuring an arbitrary number of telescopes.

The paper takes advantage of nice graphical representations of the inner workings of a nuller called “complex matrix plots” (but that we’ve nicknamed “Laugier-grams”) to find the properties a recombiner must exhibit in order to be robust to piston perturbations.

The same graphs were also featured a few months ago in a video recorded in French (first announced in this blog post) and later translated into English that explains why the 4-beam kernel-nuller of Martinache & Ireland (2018) works. Both videos were posted on Youtube:

Congratulations to Romain for another published paper to append to his upcoming PhD dissertation! The preprint version of the paper is available for download on the arXiv.org website: https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.07920. Romain’s PhD defense will take place in a little over a month on September 22, 2020.