26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Session

AIP ASTRO - ANZCOP Joint Session

10 Dec 2026, 16:30

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

107. Differentiable Simulation in Astronomy and Optics

Benjamin Pope (Macquarie University)

10/12/2026, 16:30

AIP | Astronomy (ASTRO)

Contributed Oral

Deep learning is underpinned by software allowing efficient calculation of exact derivatives. Writing physics simulations in frameworks for this, like Jax or PyTorch, allows for revolutionary new capabilities: optimization and inference in extremely high dimensions. With our dLux Fresnel-optics code, we can fit optical models jointly with neural networks to the James Webb and Hubble Space...

33. SpecML: A Self-Supervised Foundational Model for Interpreting Galaxy Spectrum used on High $z$ Source Classification and Galaxy Property Estimations

Carmen Martinez Harris (Queensland University of Technology)

10/12/2026, 16:45

AIP | Astronomy (ASTRO)

Contributed Oral

Galaxy spectra encode detailed information including redshift, ionisation conditions, metallicity and stellar content, but the features needed to recover these quantities are often faint, blended or unmeasurable in faint and distant sources, and labelled training data remain limited. We present SpecML, a self supervised foundation model that learns general representations of galaxy spectra...

176. Phase stabilised long baseline astronomical optical interferometry

Joshua Collier (ICRAR - UWA)

10/12/2026, 17:00

AIP | Astronomy (ASTRO)

Contributed Oral

Classical imaging systems are limited by the size of their primary aperture and the wavelength of light being observed [1]. This diffraction limit reduces our capacity to make astronomical observations. Interferometry allows us to increase the size of our primary aperture through aperture synthesis, drastically improving our resolving capacity. The largest existing optical interferometer has a...

179. Towards an astronomical interferometer with 1 microarsecond resolution

David Gozzard (University of Western Australia)

10/12/2026, 17:15

AIP | Astronomy (ASTRO)

Contributed Oral

The quest to peer deeper into the Universe drives the development of telescopes with ever greater resolution. Interferometers offer a way to greatly increase resolution by synthesising an aperture equivalent to the distance between interferometer elements. This has been enormously successful in radio astronomy, but at optical frequencies, the shorter wavelength and inability to record photons...

193. Spatial mode demultiplexing for astronomy beyond the diffraction limit

John Wallis (The University of Western Australia)

10/12/2026, 17:30

AIP | Astronomy (ASTRO)

Contributed Oral

Super resolution techniques have achieved impressive results in fields such as microscopy and lithography where engineered sources of light can be used to beat the diffraction limit [1]. However, for astronomy the light source is set by the target object and as such to achieve super resolution a measurement must passively extract more information from each photon. One such measurement scheme...

780. GLINT: the black magic of nulling interferometry

Matteo Colombo (The University of Sydney)

10/12/2026, 17:45

AIP | Astronomy (ASTRO)

Contributed Oral

The detection and characterisation of exoplanets requires the suppression of the overwhelming glare of their host stars while preserving the much fainter planetary signal. We present GLINT (Guided-Light Interferometric Nulling Technology), which is a nuller interferometer operating within the SCExAO instrument at the Subaru Telescope. This presentation introduces the current GLINT...