Increasing the sensitivity of stellar intensity interferometry with optical telescopes: First laboratory test of spectral multiplexing

Abstract

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.