From QuantEYE to AquEYE - Instrumentation for astrophysics on its shortest timescales

Current astronomical instrumentation essentially exploits only spatial or temporal coherence properties of the incoming photon stream. However, beyond this first-order coherence, and encoded in the arrival times of the individual photons, information lies about the details of emission mechanisms such as stimulated emission or of subsequent scattering. The Extremely Large Telescopes of the future could provide the high photon flux needed to export to the astronomical field the photonic techniques currently applied in the laboratory. These ideas were developed in a conceptual study of a focal plane instrument (QuantEYE) for the 100 m OverWhelmingly Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory. QuantEYE would be a novel astronomical photometer capable to push the time tagging capabilities toward the pico-second region. We are now building a prototype of QuantEYE for the Asiago 182 cm telescope (AquEYE), to be followed by a larger instrument for existing 8–10 m telescopes. This paper expounds the adopted technological solutions and the first steps performed to develop such a prototype.