Monomode fiber interferometer for single telescopes

The angular resolution limit imposed by atmospheric seeing may be improved upon by the application of adaptive optics to short exposure images from a single telescope. However, it has not been possible to produce diffraction limited images in the invisible bandpass by this technique. We are developing a dilute aperture, single mode fiber interferometer with adaptive optics to reach the diffraction limit of a large telescope. The spatial filtering property of such fibers causes incident wavefront aberrations to be rejected, so that the visibility of the fringes is unaffected by atmospheric distortions. Using phase closure techniques, the multiple vector baselines of the dilute aperture will yield diffraction limited images.