Related papers: Signal-to-noise ratio of phase sensing telescope i…
Continuous wavefront sensing on future space telescopes allows relaxation of stability requirements while still allowing on-orbit diffraction-limited optical performance. We consider the suitability of phase retrieval to continuously…
Space-based gravitational wave observatories, such as LISA, Taiji, and TianQin, employ long-baseline laser interferometry, necessitating displacement measurement sensitivity at 1 pm/$\sqrt{Hz}$ level. A significant challenge in achieving…
Wave front sensing of the surface of equal phase for a propagating electromagnetic wave is a vital technology in fields ranging from real time adaptive optics, to high accuracy metrology, to medical optometry. We have developed a new method…
Context: Telescopes like the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will be used together with extreme adaptive optics (AO) instruments to directly image Earth-like planets. The AO systems will need to…
The crossed-sine wavefront sensor (WFS) is a pupil plane wavefront sensor that measures the first derivatives of the wavefront. It is made by three main components: a gradient transmission filter (GTF) built from a product of sine functions…
Astronomers usually need the highest angular resolution possible, but the blurring effect of diffraction imposes a fundamental limit on the image quality from any single telescope. Interferometry allows light collected at widely-separated…
The effects of photon noise, aliasing, wavefront chromaticity and scintillation on the point spread function (PSF) contrast achievable with ground based adaptive optics (AO) are evaluated for different wavefront sensing schemes. I show that…
The upcoming extremely large telescopes will have to deal with the so-called ''pupil fragmentation'' effect: for what concerns the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the presence of thick spider legs supporting the secondary mirror may induce…
To reach the full potential of the new generation of ground based telescopes, an extremely fine adjustment of the phase is required. Wavefront control and correction before detection has therefore become one of the cornerstones of…
The TP3-WFS (Two Pupil Plane Positions Wavefront Sensor) is, to the best of the authors' knowledge, the first physical implementation of the geometrical wavefront reconstruction algorithm that has been tested in a telescope as part of an…
In an effort to transcend the limitations of differential imaging of exoplanets in the era of extremely large telescopes (ELTs), the first paper in this series established a rigorous, fully polarimetric framework for determining the science…
Fringe tracking in interferometers is typically analyzed with the implicit assumption that there is a single phase associated with each telescope in the array. If the telescopes have apertures significantly larger than r0 and only partial…
In astronomy and microscopy, distortions in the wavefront affect the dynamic range of a high contrast imaging system. These aberrations are either imposed by a turbulent medium such as the atmosphere, by static or thermal aberrations in the…
In order to efficiently image a non-absorbing sample (a phase object), dedicated phase contrast optics are required. Typically, these optics are designed with the assumption that the sample is weakly scattering, implying a linear relation…
Imaging the direct light signal from a faint exoplanet against the overwhelming glare of its host star presents one of the fundamental challenges to modern astronomical instrumentation. Achieving sufficient signal-to-noise for detection by…
In astronomy, upcoming space telescopes with wide-field optical instruments have a spatially varying point spread function (PSF). Specific scientific goals require a high-fidelity estimation of the PSF at target positions where no direct…
Equal-arm interferometric detectors of gravitational radiation allow phase measurements many orders of magnitude below the intrinsic phase stability of the laser injecting light into their arms. This is because the noise in the laser light…
Continuous wavefront sensing benefits space observatories in on-orbit optical performance maintenance. To measure the phase of a wavefront, phase retrieval is an attractive technique as it uses multiple point spread function (PSF) images…
Point source atom interferometry (PSI) uses the velocity distribution in a cold atom cloud to simultaneously measure one axis of acceleration and two axes of rotation from the phase, orientation, and period of atomic interference fringe…
Radio interferometers are phased arrays producing high-resolution images from the covariance matrix of measurements. Calibration of such instruments is necessary and is a critical task. This is how the estimation of instrumental errors is…