  QuantEYE is designed to be the highest time-resolution instrument on ESO:s
planned Overwhelmingly Large Telescope, devised to explore astrophysical
variability on microsecond and nanosecond scales, down to the quantum-optical
limit. Expected phenomena include instabilities of photon-gas bubbles in
accretion flows, p-mode oscillations in neutron stars, and quantum-optical
photon bunching in time. Precise timescales are both variable and unknown, and
studies must be of photon-stream statistics, e.g., their power spectra or
autocorrelations. Such functions increase with the square of the intensity,
implying an enormously increased sensitivity at the largest telescopes.
QuantEYE covers the optical, and its design involves an array of
photon-counting avalanche-diode detectors, each viewing one segment of the OWL
entrance pupil. QuantEYE will work already with a partially filled OWL main
mirror, and also without [full] adaptive optics.
