Photonic technologies offer more and more possibilities for instrumentation requiring guided waves and original mixing of electric fields, all in one robust and compact component. At the Subaru telescope, there are several photonic-based instruments installed on the SCExAO platform, namely the FIRST spectro-interferometer in the visible and the GLINT nuller in the IR. Thanks to the interferometric recombination of different parts of the pupil, this kind of instrument gives access to spatial scales below the diffraction limit of the telescope, thus providing super-resolution capability. On top of that, the idea of exploiting the interferometric observables to feed the AO correction loop, including especially exotic modes such as the low wind effect, is under study and practical experimentation within the FIRST instrument. This approach, directly based on the science data, offers promising and exciting prospects for both wavefront sensing techniques and exoplanet science.
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