ELHALKOUJ , Thami

The Planet Formation Imager (PFI) is a project for a very large optical interferometer intended to obtain images of the planet formation process at scales as small as the Hill sphere of giant exoplanets. Its main science instruments will work in the thermal infrared but it will be cophased in the near infrared, where it requires also some...

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Hierarchical Fringe Tracking (HFT) is a fringe tracking concept optimizing the sensitivity in optical long baseline by reducing to an absolute minimum the number of measurements used to correct the OPD fluctuations. By nature, the performances of an HFT do not decreases with the number of apertures of the interferometer and are set only by the...

The VLTI has a huge potential for the study of Active Galactic Nuclei. It allows to resolve the BLR by phase differential interferometry and to make images of the inner dust « torus ». The first generation VLTI instruments AMBER and MIDI allowed studies of the size-luminosity of the inner dust structures and showed strong departures from the...