First test on Photonic Crystal Fiber potential for broadband interferometry

The Photonic Crystal Fibers (PCFs) are microstructured waveguides currently developed in the frame of metrology, non-linear optics or coherent tomography. PCF studies are mainly focused on the improvement of dispersion property and wide spectral single-mode operating domain. Consequently, in the astronomical context, this kind of fiber is a good candidate to design a fiber linked version of stellar interferometer for aperture synthesis. In this paper, we study the potential of these fibers taking advantage of the wide spectral single-mode operation. We propose an experimental setup acting as a two-beam interferometer using PCFs to measure fringes contrasts at four different wavelengths (670nm, 980nm, 1328nm and 1543nm) corresponding to R, I, J and H astronomical bands with the same couple of PCFs. For this purpose, we implement for the first time a piezoelectric PCF optical path modulator. c © 2004 Optical Society of America