Developing linear dark-field control for exoplanet direct imaging in the laboratory and on ground-based telescopes

Abstract

Imaging rocky planets in reflected light, a key focus of future NASA missions and ELTs, requires advanced wavefront control to maintain a deep, temporally correlated null of stellar halo at just several diffraction beam widths. We discuss development of Linear Dark Field Control (LDFC) to achieve this aim. We describe efforts to test spatial LDFC in a laboratory setting for the first time, using the Ames Coronagraph Experiment (ACE) testbed. Our preliminary results indicate that spatial LDFC is a promising method focal-plane wavefront control method capable of maintaining a static dark hole, at least at contrasts relevant for imaging mature planets with 30m-class telescopes.

A New Type of Exoplanet Direct Imaging Search: The SCExAO/CHARIS Survey of Accelerating Stars

“…The CHARIS Data Processing Pipeline (DPP) has been used in nearly all SCExAO/CHARIS papers thus far 31,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41] and is utilized in our HGCA survey. The DPP performs sky subtraction, cube registration, spectrophotometric calibration, PSF subtraction, and planet and disk forward-modeling.…”

Performance and early science with the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics project

“…48 See SPIE paper 11117-65 for more details. 49 • Integral Field Polarimetry with CHARIS -Recently commissioned, CHARIS's "integral field polarimetry" mode splits light into two polarizations over a 1.2"x2.4" field for 22 separate spectral channels covering J through K. This new mode allows us to detect small-scale emission from protoplanetary and debris disks and yield both total intensity and polarized intensity spectra to get a wavelength-dependent polarization fraction. Its utility for planet detection around young stars is key.…”