Seidr is a photonic kernel-nulling instrument which will operate within the H-band as a node in Bifrost in the Asgard Instrumentation Suite, at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). Seidr uses advanced photonic technology to achieve high angular resolution and high contrast imaging of faint companions and circumstellar material.
A kernel-nulling chip destructively suppresses starlight from the VLTI’s four telescopes to reveal faint off-axis signals. Its main science cases include detecting young, self-luminous giant exoplanets, probing warm exozodiacal dust close to nearby stars, and exploring future pathways towards the detection of faint companions such as exomoons.
Seidr introduces hybrid mode-selective photonic lanterns upstream of the kernel nulling chip to optimise light injected into the chip using a mode-selective core. Simultaneously, the lanterns sense wavefront errors on the same optical path using their wavefront sensing cores, reducing non-common-path aberrations and improving nulling performance.
