INCREASING THE SENSITIVITY OF STELLAR INTENSITY INTERFEROMETRY WITH OPTICAL TELESCOPES: FIRST LABORATORY TEST OF SPECTRAL MULTIPLEXING

We present a preliminary laboratory test of a setup designed to measure Hanbury Brown and Twiss-type intensity correlations from a chaotic light source using five spectral channels simultaneously.

After averaging the zero-delay correlation peaks from all channels, we obtain an improvement of the signalto-noise ratio fairly consistent with theory. The goal is to demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of this technique to improve the sensitivity of stellar intensity interferometry using optical telescopes.