Effectiveness of high-order adaptive optics in ground-based stellar interferometry

The ground-based optical interferometer with large apertures is a potential research tool for the study of stellar astrophysics and the synthesis of high-resolution stellar images. However, atmospheric turbulence can impose a significant limitation on the interferometer's performance. In order to reduce those degrading effects, we investigate the effectiveness of high-order adaptive optics in ground-based optical interferometry. The purposes of this paper are (1) to evaluate the performance with and without using high-order adaptive optics in a ground-based optical interferometer with large-aperture telescopes, and (2) to investigate the possibility of using the Strehl ratio to estimate visibility. The theoretical methodology and computer simulation results used to evaluate the performance of a ground-based stellar interferometer with high-order adaptive optics are presented, and a numerical computational method that uses the Strehl ratio to estimate the mean squared atmospheric coherence loss factor is developed.