381 research outputs found
Apodized Pupil Lyot Coronagraphs for Arbitrary Apertures. IV. Reduced Inner Working Angle and Increased Robustness to Low-Order Aberrations
The Apodized Pupil Lyot Coronagraph (APLC) is a diffraction suppression
system installed in the recently deployed instruments Palomar/P1640,
Gemini/GPI, and VLT/SPHERE to allow direct imaging and spectroscopy of
circumstellar environments. Using a prolate apodization, the current
implementations offer raw contrasts down to at 0.2 arcsec from a star
over a wide bandpass (20\%), in the presence of central obstruction and struts,
enabling the study of young or massive gaseous planets. Observations of older
or lighter companions at smaller separations would require improvements in
terms of inner working angle (IWA) and contrast, but the methods originally
used for these designs were not able to fully explore the parameter space. We
here propose a novel approach to improve the APLC performance. Our method
relies on the linear properties of the coronagraphic electric field with the
apodization at any wavelength to develop numerical solutions producing
coronagraphic star images with high-contrast region in broadband light. We
explore the parameter space by considering different aperture geometries,
contrast levels, dark-zone sizes, bandpasses, and focal plane mask sizes. We
present an application of these solutions to the case of Gemini/GPI with a
design delivering a raw contrast at 0.19 arcsec and offering a
significantly reduced sensitivity to low-order aberrations compared to the
current implementation. Optimal solutions have also been found to reach
contrast in broadband light regardless of the telescope aperture
shape (in particular the central obstruction size), with effective IWA in the
range, therefore making the APLC a suitable option for the
future exoplanet direct imagers on the ground or in space.Comment: 14 pages, 10 figures, accepted in Ap
Apodized phase mask coronagraphs for arbitrary apertures. II. Comprehensive review of solutions for the vortex coronagraph
With a clear circular aperture, the vortex coronagraph perfectly cancels an
on-axis point source and offers a 0.9 or 1.75 lambda/D inner working angle for
topological charge 2 or 4, respectively. Current and near-future large
telescopes are on-axis, however, and the diffraction effects of the central
obscuration, and the secondary supports are strong enough to prevent the
detection of companions 1e-3 - 1e-5 as bright as, or fainter than, their host
star. Recent advances show that a ring apodizer can restore the performance of
this coronagraph by compensating for the diffraction effects of a circular
central obscuration in a 1D modeling of the pupil. We extend this work and
optimize apodizers for arbitrary apertures in 2D in order to tackle the
diffraction effects of the spiders and other noncircular artefacts in the
pupil. We use a numerical optimization scheme to compute hybrid coronagraph
designs that combine the advantages of the vortex coronagraph (small in IWA)
and of shaped pupils coronagraphs (robustness to central obscuration and pupil
asymmetric structures). We maximize the apodizer transmission, while
constraints are set on the extremum values of the electric field that is
computed in chosen regions of the Lyot plane through closed form expressions.
Optimal apodizers are computed for topological charges 2 and 4 vortex
coronagraphs and for telescope apertures with 10-30% central obscurations and
0-1% thick spiders. We characterize the impacts of the obscuration ratio and
the thickness of the spiders on the throughput and the IWA for the two
topological charges.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figures, 2 table
Apodized vortex coronagraph designs for segmented aperture telescopes
Current state-of-the-art high contrast imaging instruments take advantage of
a number of elegant coronagraph designs to suppress starlight and image nearby
faint objects, such as exoplanets and circumstellar disks. The ideal
performance and complexity of the optical systems depends strongly on the shape
of the telescope aperture. Unfortunately, large primary mirrors tend to be
segmented and have various obstructions, which limit the performance of most
conventional coronagraph designs. We present a new family of vortex
coronagraphs with numerically-optimized gray-scale apodizers that provide the
sensitivity needed to directly image faint exoplanets with large, segmented
aperture telescopes, including the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) as well as
potential next-generation space telescopes.Comment: To appear in SPIE proceedings vol. 991
Ring-apodized vortex coronagraphs for obscured telescopes. I. Transmissive ring apodizers
The vortex coronagraph (VC) is a new generation small inner working angle
(IWA) coronagraph currently offered on various 8-meter class ground-based
telescopes. On these observing platforms, the current level of performance is
not limited by the intrinsic properties of actual vortex devices, but by
wavefront control residuals and incoherent background (e.g. thermal emission of
the sky) or the light diffracted by the imprint of the secondary mirror and
support structures on the telescope pupil. In the particular case of unfriendly
apertures (mainly large central obscuration) when very high contrast is needed
(e.g. direct imaging of older exoplanets with extremely large telescopes or
space- based coronagraphs), a simple VC, as most coronagraphs, can not deliver
its nominal performance because of the contamination due to the diffraction
from the obscured part of the pupil. Here we propose a novel yet simple concept
that circumvents this problem. We combine a vortex phase mask in the image
plane of a high-contrast instrument with a single pupil-based amplitude ring
apodizer, tailor designed to exploit the unique convolution properties of the
VC at the Lyot-stop plane. We show that such a ring-apodized vortex coronagraph
(RAVC) restores the perfect attenuation property of the VC regardless of the
size of the central obscuration, and for any (even) topological charge of the
vortex. More importantly the RAVC maintains the IWA and conserves a fairly high
throughput, which are signature properties of the VC.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure
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