Phase Closure Nulling: results from the 2009 campaign

We present here a new observational technique, Phase Closure Nulling (PCN), which has the potential to obtainvery high contrast detection and spectroscopy of faint companions to bright stars. PCN consists in measuringclosure phases of fully resolved objects with a baseline triplet where one of the baselines crosses a null of theobject visibility function. For scenes dominated by the presence of a stellar disk, the correlated flux of the stararound nulls is essentially canceled out, and in these regions the signature of fainter, unresolved, scene object(s)dominates the imaginary part of the visibility in particular the closure phase. We present here the basics of thePCN method, the initial proof-of-concept observation, the envisioned science cases and report about the firstobserving campaign made on VLTI/AMBER and CHARA/MIRC using this technique.

Observing technique
Optical interferometry
Complex visibility
Closure phase
Spectroscopic binaries
Companions

References(9)

Figures(1)

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