Towards measuring astrophysical third-order correlation functions with the H.E.S.S. optical intensity interferometer

ABSTRACT The closure phase, the sum of the three Fourier phases in a telescope triangle, is an important tool in astronomical interferometry, helping to reconstruct the geometries of the observed objects. While already established in amplitude interferometry, for the recently expanding field of intensity interferometers, the closure phase enables recovering information of the interferometric phases that are otherwise inaccessible with this technique. To extract the (cosine of) the closure phase ($\cos \phi$) in intensity interferometry, third-order correlations between three simultaneously measuring telescopes have to be computed. As the signal-to-noise ratio of such three-photon correlations is too small for current generation intensity interferometers, no third-order correlations of astrophysical targets have been recorded so far. In this paper, we present the first measurements of third-order correlation functions of two stellar systems, Nunki ($\sigma$ Sgr) and Dschubba ($\delta$ Sco), observed with the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.) intensity interferometer in 2023. We show how to isolate the three-photon contribution term from the two-photon contributions, in order to access $\cos \phi$. For the observed stellar targets, the sensitivity is not high enough to extract closure phase information. To demonstrate that the analysis works well, we further extract $\cos \phi$ in a laboratory experiment, using the H.E.S.S. intensity interferometer and a pseudo-thermal light source.