Yance-Orcasita, Armando De J.

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Stellar imaging interferometry
(2003) Yance-Orcasita, Armando De J.; Chang, Mark J.L.; College of Arts and Science - Science; Jiménez, Héctor; Pabón-Ortiz, Carlos U.; Department of Physics; Gooransarab, Haedeh
This thesis work, developed at the laboratories of the Department of Physics of the University of Puerto Rico, reports the first efforts to build a prototype stellar interferometer with applications to stellar astrophysics. The work is focused in the automation of the key subsystems in the interferometer: the Optical Delay Lines (ODLs). The automation of the mechanical controls that allows displacement of ODL, is achieved through the use of inexpensively built stepper motors and driver cards, using slave processors and implementing control through their parallel ports. Our Objective was to obtain precision displacement of the system that controls the ODL. We found that the motors were able to move 400 nm per step in one direction; with a maximum error of 0.5%, but bidirectional motion has a much larger error in our implementation of the system. In testing the prototype while studying the visibility of the fringes, I found that the polarization effects due to the reflections away from normal incidence are an important factor for the optical design of the interferometer.