Experimental demonstration of enhanced resolution of a Golay3 sparse-aperture telescope

In this Letter, we report a Golay3 sparse-aperture telescope newly built in the Key Laboratory of Optical Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences and present the experimental results of enhanced resolution. The telescope consisting of 3 collector telescopes of 127 mm diameter can achieve a theoretical resolution corresponding to a monolithic aperture of 245 mm diameter. It is shown by the experimental results that the resolution is improved to 3.33 mu rad with respect to the diffraction limit of 6.07 mu rad for a single aperture using the Rayleigh criteria at 632 nm. The compact optical configuration and cophasing approach are also described.