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Register a new userLyot-plane phase masks for improved high-contrast imaging with a vortex coronagraph
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The vortex coronagraph is an optical instrument that precisely removes on-axis starlight allowing for high contrast imaging at small angular separation from the star, thereby providing a crucial capability for direct detection and characterization of exoplanets and circumstellar disks. Telescopes with aperture obstructions, such as secondary mirrors and spider support structures, require advanced coronagraph designs to provide adequate starlight suppression. We introduce a phase-only Lyot-plane optic to the vortex coronagraph that offers improved contrast performance on telescopes with complicated apertures. Potential solutions for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) are described and compared. Adding a Lyot-plane phase mask relocates residual starlight away from a region of the image plane thereby reducing stellar noise and improving sensitivity to off-axis companions. The phase mask is calculated using an iterative phase retrieval algorithm. Numerically, we achieve a contrast on the order of $10^{-6}$ for a companion with angular displacement as small as $4~lambda/D$ with an E-ELT type aperture. Even in the presence of aberrations, improved performance is expected compared to either a conventional vortex coronagraph or optimized pupil plane phase element alone.
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High contrast imaging is the primary path to the direct detection and characterization of Earth-like planets around solar-type stars; a cleverly designed internal coronagraph suppresses the light from the star, revealing the elusive circumstellar companions. However, future large-aperture telescopes ($>$4~m in diameter) will likely have segmented primary mirrors, which causes additional diffraction of unwanted stellar light. Here we present the first high contrast laboratory demonstration of an apodized vortex coronagraph (AVC), in which an apodizer is placed upstream of a vortex focal plane mask to improve its performance with a segmented aperture. The gray-scale apodization is numerically optimized to yield a better sensitivity to faint companions assuming an aperture shape similar to the LUVOIR-B concept. Using wavefront sensing and control over a one-sided dark hole, we achieve a raw contrast of $2times10^{-8}$ in monochromatic light at 775~nm, and a raw contrast of $4times10^{-8}$ in a 10% bandwidth. These results open the path to a new family of coronagraph designs, optimally suited for next-generation segmented space telescopes.
We present methods for optimizing pupil and focal plane optical elements that improve the performance of vortex coronagraphs on telescopes with obstructed or segmented apertures. Phase-only and complex masks are designed for the entrance pupil, focal plane, and the plane of the Lyot stop. Optimal masks are obtained using both analytical and numerical methods. The latter makes use of an iterative error reduction algorithm to calculate correcting optics that mitigate unwanted diffraction from aperture obstructions. We analyze the achieved performance in terms of starlight suppression, contrast, off-axis image quality, and chromatic dependence. Manufacturing considerations and sensitivity to aberrations are also discussed. This work provides a path to joint optimization of multiple coronagraph planes to maximize sensitivity to exoplanets and other faint companions.
The Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization (PIAA) coronagraph is a high performance coronagraph concept able to work at small angular separation with little loss in throughput. We present results obtained with a laboratory PIAA system including active wavefront control. The system has a 94.3% throughput (excluding coating losses) and operates in air with monochromatic light. Our testbed achieved a 2.27e-7 raw contrast between 1.65 lambda/D (inner working angle of the coronagraph configuration tested) and 4.4 lambda/D (outer working angle). Through careful calibration, we were able to separate this residual light into a dynamic coherent component (turbulence, vibrations) at 4.5e-8 contrast and a static incoherent component (ghosts and/or polarization missmatch) at 1.6e-7 contrast. Pointing errors are controlled at the 1e-3 lambda/D level using a dedicated low order wavefront sensor. While not sufficient for direct imaging of Earth-like planets from space, the 2.27e-7 raw contrast achieved already exceeds requirements for a ground-based Extreme Adaptive Optics system aimed at direct detection of more massive exoplanets. We show that over a 4hr long period, averaged wavefront errors have been controlled to the 3.5e-9 contrast level. This result is particularly encouraging for ground based Extreme-AO systems relying on long term stability and absence of static wavefront errors to recover planets much fainter than the fast boiling speckle halo.
Imaging exo-Earths is an exciting but challenging task because of the 10^-10 contrast ratio between these planets and their host star at separations narrower than 100 mas. Large segmented aperture space telescopes enable the sensitivity needed to observe a large number of planets. Combined with coronagraphs with wavefront control, they present a promising avenue to generate a high-contrast region in the image of an observed star. Another key aspect is the required stability in telescope pointing, focusing, and co-phasing of the segments of the telescope primary mirror for long-exposure observations of rocky planets for several hours to a few days. These wavefront errors should be stable down to a few tens of picometers RMS, requiring a permanent active correction of these errors during the observing sequence. To calibrate these pointing errors and other critical low-order aberrations, we propose a wavefront sensing path based on Zernike phase-contrast methods to analyze the starlight that is filtered out by the coronagraph at the telescope focus. In this work we present the analytical retrieval of the incoming low order aberrations in the starlight beam that is filtered out by an Apodized Pupil Lyot Coronagraph, one of the leading coronagraph types for starlight suppression. We implement this approach numerically for the active control of these aberrations and present an application with our first experimental results on the High-contrast imager for Complex Aperture Telescopes (HiCAT) testbed, the STScI testbed for Earth-twin observations with future large space observatories, such as LUVOIR and HabEx, two NASA flagship mission concepts.
We present the Vortex Image Processing (VIP) library, a python package dedicated to astronomical high-contrast imaging. Our package relies on the extensive python stack of scientific libraries and aims to provide a flexible framework for high-contrast data and image processing. In this paper, we describe the capabilities of VIP related to processing image sequences acquired using the angular differential imaging (ADI) observing technique. VIP implements functionalities for building high-contrast data processing pipelines, encompass- ing pre- and post-processing algorithms, potential sources position and flux estimation, and sensitivity curves generation. Among the reference point-spread function subtraction techniques for ADI post-processing, VIP includes several flavors of principal component analysis (PCA) based algorithms, such as annular PCA and incremental PCA algorithm capable of processing big datacubes (of several gigabytes) on a computer with limited memory. Also, we present a novel ADI algorithm based on non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), which comes from the same family of low-rank matrix approximations as PCA and provides fairly similar results. We showcase the ADI capabilities of the VIP library using a deep sequence on HR8799 taken with the LBTI/LMIRCam and its recently commissioned L-band vortex coronagraph. Using VIP we investigated the presence of additional companions around HR8799 and did not find any significant additional point source beyond the four known planets. VIP is available at http://github.com/vortex-exoplanet/VIP and is accompanied with Jupyter notebook tutorials illustrating the main functionalities of the library.
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