CHARA beam combiner design

The problem of designing a beam combiner that involves more than two or three beams is complex and by no means solved. No such system has been built to date. The CHARA Array will require a beam combining system that can cope with up the seven beams with a number of spectral channels. The design of a beam combiner is probably driven more by the available technology than any theoretical constraints. Many tradeoffs between ease of manufacture and required integration time are involved. A design solution for CHARA will be presented that will incorporate spatial fringe encoding and forming fringes in the image plane.

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