High contrast imaging (HCI) systems rely on active wavefront control (WFC) to deliver deep raw contrast in the focal plane, and on calibration techniques to further enhance contrast by identifying planet light within the residual speckle halo. Both functions can be combined in an HCI system and we discuss a path toward designing HCI systems capable of calibrating residual starlight at the fundamental contrast limit imposed by photon noise. We highlight the value of deploying multiple high-efficiency wavefront sensors (WFSs) covering a wide spectral range and spanning multiple optical locations. We show how their combined information can be leveraged to simultaneously improve WFS sensitivity and residual starlight calibration, ideally making it impossible for an image plane speckle to hide from WFS telemetry. We demonstrate residual starlight calibration in the laboratory and on-sky, using both a coronagraphic setup, and a nulling spectro-interferometer. In both case, we show that bright starlight can calibrate residual starlight.
@article{arxiv.2109.13958,
title = {High contrast imaging at the photon noise limit with self-calibrating WFS/C systems},
author = {Olivier Guyon and Barnaby Norris and Marc-Antoine Martinod and Kyohoon Ahn and Peter Tuthill and Jared Males and Alison Wong and Nour Skaf and Thayne Currie and Kelsey Miller and Steven P. Bos and Julien Lozi and Vincent Deo and Sebastien Vievard and Ruslan Belikov and Kyle van Gorkom and Benjamin Mazin and Michael Bottom and Richard Frazin and Alexander Rodack and Tyler Groff and Nemanja Jovanovic and Frantz Martinache},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.13958},
year = {2021}
}