Improvements for group delay fringe tracking

Abstract

Group delay fringe tracking using spectrally-dispersed fringes is suitable for stabilising the optical path difference in ground-based astronomical optical interferometers in low light situations. We discuss the performance of group delay tracking algorithms when the effects of atmospheric dispersion, high-frequency atmospheric temporal phase variations, non-ideal path modulation, non-ideal spectral sampling, and the detection artifacts introduced by electron-multiplying CCDs (EMCCDs) are taken into account, and we present ways in which the tracking capability can be optimised in the presence of these effects.