Related papers: Fully achromatic nulling interferometer (FANI) for…
Vortex Fiber Nulling (VFN) is an interferometric method for suppressing starlight to detect and spectroscopically characterize exoplanets. It relies on a vortex phase mask and single-mode fiber to reject starlight while simultaneously…
Starlight suppression techniques for High-Contrast Imaging (HCI) are crucial to achieving the demanding contrast ratios and inner working angles required for detecting and characterizing exoplanets with a wide range of masses and…
Understanding the atmospheres of exoplanets is a milestone to decipher their formation history and potential habitability. High-contrast imaging and spectroscopy of exoplanets is the major pathway towards the goal. Directly imaging of an…
Coronagraphs allow for faint off-axis exoplanets to be observed, but are limited to angular separations greater than a few beam widths. Accessing closer-in separations would greatly increase the expected number of detectable planets, which…
The Fourier-Kelvin Stellar Interferometer (FKSI) is a mission concept for a nulling interferometer for the near-to-mid-infrared spectral region. FKSI is conceived as a mid-sized strategic or Probe class mission. FKSI has been endorsed by…
Nulling interferometry is a promising technique for direct detection of exoplanets. However, the performance of current devices is limited by different perturbations sources and especially by its sensitivity to any phase aberrations. The…
Vortex fiber nulling (VFN) is a method that may enable the detection and characterization of exoplanets at small angular separations (0.5-2 $\lambda/D$) with ground- and space-based telescopes. Since the field of view is within the inner…
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…
We evaluate the direct detection of extrasolar giant planets with a two-aperture nulling infrared interferometer, working at angles ${\theta}<{\lambda}/2B$, and using a new `ratio-of-two-wavelengths' technique. Simple arguments suggest that…
Exoplanet research is essential for understanding planetary formation and the potential for life beyond our solar system. The direct imaging method captures exoplanet light while minimizing light from the host star. This is conventionally…
Instrumentation designed to characterize potentially habitable planets may combine adaptive optics and high-resolution spectroscopy techniques to achieve the highest possible sensitivity to spectral signs of life. Detecting the weak signal…
In this paper, we review the various ways in which an infrared stellar interferometer can be used to perform direct detection of extrasolar planetary systems. We first review the techniques based on classical stellar interferometry, where…
Herein is discussed the performance of spaceborne nulling interferometers searching for extra-solar planets, in terms of their extinction maps projected on-sky. In particular, it is shown that the designs of Spatial Filtering (SF) and…
As the number of confirmed exoplanets continues to grow, there is an increased push to spectrally characterize them to determine their atmospheric composition, formation paths, rotation rates, and habitability. However, there is a large…
An international group of scientists has begun planning for the Planet Formation Imager (PFI, www.planetformationimager.org), a next-generation infrared interferometer array with the primary goal of imaging the active phases of planet…
Vortex fiber nulling (VFN) is a single-aperture interferometric technique for detecting and characterizing exoplanets separated from their host star by less than a diffracted beam width. VFN uses a vortex mask and single mode fiber to…
One of the biggest challenges associated with a nulling interferometer-based approach to detecting extra-solar Earth-like planets comes from the extremely stringent requirements of pathlength, polarization and amplitude matching in the…
The Planet Formation Imager (PFI, www.planetformationimager.org) is a next-generation infrared interferometer array with the primary goal of imaging the active phases of planet formation in nearby star forming regions. PFI will be sensitive…
The Palomar Fiber Nuller (PFN) is a rotating-baseline nulling interferometer that enables high-accuracy near-infrared (NIR) nulling observations with full azimuth coverage. To achieve NIR null-depth accuracies of several x 10-4, the PFN…
The nulling interferometers proposed to study planets around other stars are generally well suited for studying small-scale structures surrounding other bright pointlike objects such as the nuclei of active galaxies. Conventional…