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4 July 2022 Laboratory demonstration of real-time focal plane wavefront control of residual atmospheric speckles
Benjamin L. Gerard, Daren Dillon, Sylvain Cetre, Rebecca M. Jensen-Clem
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Abstract

Current and future high contrast imaging instruments aim to detect exoplanets at closer orbital separations, lower masses, and/or older ages than their predecessors. However, continually evolving speckles in the coronagraphic science image limit contrasts of state-of-the-art ground-based exoplanet imaging instruments. For ground-based adaptive optics (AO) instruments, it remains challenging for most speckle suppression techniques to attenuate both the dynamic atmospheric as well as quasistatic instrumental speckles on-sky. We have proposed a focal plane wavefront sensing and control algorithm to address this challenge, called the fast atmospheric selfcoherent camera (SCC) technique (FAST), which in theory enables the SCC to operate down to millisecond timescales even when only a few photons are detected per speckle. Here, we present the first experimental results of FAST on the Santa Cruz Extreme AO Laboratory (SEAL) testbed. In particular, we illustrate the benefit of “second stage” AO-based focal plane wavefront control, demonstrating up to 5  ×   contrast improvement with FAST closed-loop compensation of evolving residual atmospheric turbulence—both for low and high order spatial modes—down to 20-ms timescales.

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
Benjamin L. Gerard, Daren Dillon, Sylvain Cetre, and Rebecca M. Jensen-Clem "Laboratory demonstration of real-time focal plane wavefront control of residual atmospheric speckles," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 8(3), 039001 (4 July 2022). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.8.3.039001
Received: 21 December 2021; Accepted: 17 June 2022; Published: 4 July 2022
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Cited by 1 scholarly publication.
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KEYWORDS
Wavefronts

Adaptive optics

Coronagraphy

Microelectromechanical systems

Spatial frequencies

Planets

Speckle

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