PIONIER: a 4-telescope visitor instrument at VLTI

By J. L. Bouquin, J. Berger, B. Lazareff, G. Zins, P. Haguenauer, L. Jocou, P. Kern, R. Millan-Gabet, Wesley A. Traub, O. Absil and 36 more. 2011

267 citations recorded by the source corpus.

PIONIER stands for Precision Integrated-Optics Near-infrared Imaging ExpeRiment. It combines four 1.8m Auxilliary Telescopes or four 8m Unit Telescopes of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (ESO, Chile) using an integrated optics combiner. The instrument has been integrated at IPAG starting in December 2009 and commissioned at the Paranal Observatory in October 2010. It provides scientific observations since November 2010. In this paper, we detail the instrumental concept, we describe the standard operational modes and the data reduction strategy. We present the typical performance and discuss how to improve them. This paper is based on laboratory data obtained during the integrations at IPAG, as well as on-sky data gathered during the commissioning at VLTI. We illustrate the imaging capability of PIONIER on the binaries deltaSco and HIP11231. PIONIER provides 6 visibilities and 3 independent closure phases in the H band, either in a broadband mode or with a low spectral dispersion (R=40), using natural light (i.e. unpolarized). The limiting magnitude is Hmag=7 in dispersed mode under median atmospheric conditions (seeing 3ms) with the 1.8m Auxiliary Telescopes. We demonstrate a precision of 0.5deg on the closure phases. The precision on the calibrated visibilities ranges from 3 to 15% depending on the atmospheric conditions. PIONIER has been installed and successfully tested as a visitor instrument for the VLTI. It permits high angular resolution imaging studies at an unprecedented level of sensitivity. The successful combination of the four 8m Unit Telescopes in March 2011 demonstrates that VLTI is ready for 4-telescope operation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9e33019e0728287d254afb12e17db8e697309107

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. R. Genzel
2. A. Eckart
3. T. Ott
4. F. Eisenhauer
5. S. Gillessen
6. O. Pfuhl
7. K. Kratter
8. E. Sturm

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. R. Genzel
2. T. Ott
3. S. Gillessen
4. A. Eckart
5. F. Eisenhauer
6. O. Pfuhl
7. Th. Henning
8. Pierre Kervella

In Instrumentation

1. R. Genzel
2. A. Eckart
3. F. Eisenhauer
4. T. Ott
5. E. Sturm
6. H. Sana
7. C. Hummel
8. P. de Zeeuw

Citations in the corpus

• First light for GRAVITY: Phase referencing optical interferometry for the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (2017, methodology): “This technology is widely used in telecommunications up to a wavelength of 1.6 µ m and has been successfully applied in astronomical interferometry in the H - band (Le Bouquin et al. 2011).”
• Searching for faint companions with VLTI/PIONIER - II. 92 main sequence stars from the Exozodi survey (2014, methodology): “Asa sanity check, we also carried out our study based on a more standard calibration scheme, where the transfer function is averaged over each individual CAL-SCI-CAL-SCI-CAL-SCI-CAL s quence with a weight inversely related to the time separation, as described in Le Bouquin et al. (2011).”
• SOUTHERN MASSIVE STARS AT HIGH ANGULAR RESOLUTION: OBSERVATIONAL CAMPAIGN AND COMPANION DETECTION (2014, methodology): “The typical accuracy is 2% (Le Bouquin et al. 2011).”