| Title: |
GRAVITY faint: reducing noise sources in GRAVITY$^+$ with a fast metrology attenuation system |
| Authors: |
Widmann, F., Gillessen, S., Ott, T., Shimizu, T., Eisenhauer, F., Fabricius, M., Woillez, J., Gonté, F., Horrobin, M., Shangguan, J., Yazici, S., Perrin, G., Paumard, T., Brandner, W., Kreidberg, L., Straubmeier, C., Perraut, K., Bouquin, J. -B. Le, Garcia, P., Hönig, S., Defrère, D., Bourdarot, G., Drescher, A., Feuchtgruber, H., Genzel, R., Hartl, M., Lutz, D., More, N., Rau, C., Uysal, S., Wieprecht, E. |
| Publication Year: |
2022 |
| Collection: |
Astrophysics |
| Subject Terms: |
Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics |
| More Details: |
With the upgrade from GRAVITY to GRAVITY$^+$ the instrument will evolve into an all-sky interferometer that can observe faint targets, such as high redshift AGN. Observing the faintest targets requires reducing the noise sources in GRAVITY as much as possible. The dominant noise source, especially in the blue part of the spectrum, is the backscattering of the metrology laser light onto the detector. To reduce this noise we introduce two new metrology modes. With a combination of small hardware changes and software adaptations, we can dim the metrology laser during the observation without losing the phase referencing. For single beam targets, we can even turn off the metrology laser for the maximum SNR on the detector. These changes lead to an SNR improvement of over a factor of two averaged over the whole spectrum and up to a factor of eight in the part of the spectrum currently dominated by laser noise.
Comment: Proceeding of SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation 2022 |
| Document Type: |
Working Paper |
| Access URL: |
http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.05593 |
| Accession Number: |
edsarx.2209.05593 |
| Database: |
arXiv |
