Crosstalk in image plane beam combination for optical interferometers

Image plane beam combination in optical interferometers multiplexes the interference fringes from multiple baselines on to a single detector. The beams of starlight are arranged in a non-redundant pattern at the entrance of the combiner so that the signal from each baseline can be separated from one another in the frequency domain. If the signals from different baselines overlap in the frequency domain, this can give rise to a systematic error in the fringe measurements known as baseline crosstalk. In this paper, we quantify crosstalk arising from the combination of atmospheric seeing and beam propagation over distances of the order of hundreds of metres. We find that in idealized conditions atmospheric wavefront errors and beam propagation do not contribute to crosstalk. However, when aperture stops are included in the optical beam train we observe that wavefront errors can result in squared visibility errors arising from crosstalk as high as ΔV2 = 6.6 × 10−3 under realistic observing conditions.