APreS-MIDI: aperture synthesis in the mid-infrared with the VLTI

We are studying an optical concept aiming at recombining 4 telescope beams. Interference fringes are sampled in the pupil plane. Such a principle is perfectly adapted for reconstructing images by aperture synthesis at 10 μm with the VLTI. This principle could be used for building a new generation 10 μm instrument, but instead of doing a totally new instrument, we propose the design of an optical module that can supply the current MIDI-VLTI instrument with 4 beams.