Laboratory Demonstration of the Local Oscillator Concept for the Event Horizon Imager

Abstract

Black hole imaging challenges the 3rd generation space VLBI, the Very Long Baseline Interferometry, to operate on a 500 GHz band. The coherent integration time needed here is 450 s though the available space oscillators cannot offer more than 10 s. Self-calibration methods might solve this issue in an interferometer formed by 3 antenna/satellite systems, but the need for the 3rd satellite increases mission costs. A frequency transfer is of special interest to alleviate both performance and cost issues. A concept of 2-way optical frequency transfer is examined to investigate its suitability to enable space-to-space interferometry, in particular, to image the 'shadows' of black holes from space. The concept, promising on paper, has been demonstrated by tests. The laboratory test set-up is presented and the verification of the temporal stability using standard analysis tool as TimePod has been passed. The resulting Allan Deviation is dominated by the 1/$\tau$ phase noise trend since the frequency transfer timescale of interest is shorter than 0.2 s. This trend continues into longer integration times, as proven by the longest tests spanning over a few hours. The Allan Deviation between derived 103.2 GHz oscillators is $1.1\times10^{-14}/\tau$ within 10 ms < $\tau$ < 1,000 s that degrades twice towards the longest delay 0.2 s. The worst case satisfies the requirement with a margin of 11 times. The obtained coherence in the range of 0.997-0.9998 is beneficial for space VLBI at 557 GHz. The result is of special interest to future science missions for black hole imaging from space.