GENIE: High-Resolution Study of Debris Disks

GENIE, the Ground-based European Nulling Interferometer Experiment, will combine the lights collected in the L’ band by two VLT telescopes in a destructive way, thereby revealing the thermal and/or scattered emission of faint objects in the close neighbourhood of the target star. A prime scientific goal for GENIE thus consists in the detection and characterization of debris disks around nearby Vega-type stars. Thanks to its high angular resolution and operating wavelength (3.8 µm), GENIE will be particularly sensitive to the thermal emission from the warm dust standing within a few AU from the star, a part of the disks which is not accessible with current detection methods (IR photometric excesses, sub-millimeter imaging, …). In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of GENIE to detect and characterize the physical parameters of the debris disk around zeta Leporis, a prototypical Vega-type star suspected to harbour a warm dust component in its debris disk (Fajardo-Acosta et al., AJ 115, 2101). This study is then extended to the detection of faint exozodiacal disks around typical Darwin/TPF targets, thereby demonstrating the very high potential of GENIE in the field of high-contrast imaging.