Related papers: High-contrast Demonstration of an Apodized Vortex …
The detection of molecular species in the atmospheres of earth-like exoplanets orbiting nearby stars requires an optical system that suppresses starlight and maximizes the sensitivity to the weak planet signals at small angular separations.…
Current state-of-the-art high contrast imaging instruments take advantage of a number of elegant coronagraph designs to suppress starlight and image nearby faint objects, such as exoplanets and circumstellar disks. The ideal performance and…
The vortex coronagraph (VC) is a new generation small inner working angle (IWA) coronagraph currently offered on various 8-meter class ground-based telescopes. On these observing platforms, the current level of performance is not limited by…
The vortex coronagraph is one of the most promising coronagraphs for high contrast imaging because of its simplicity, small inner working angle, high throughput, and clear off-axis discovery space. However, as with most coronagraphs,…
Of the over 5000 exoplanets that have been detected, only about a dozen have ever been directly imaged. Earth-like exoplanets are on the order of 10 billion times fainter than their host star in visible and near-infrared, requiring a…
The vector vortex coronagraph is an instrument designed for direct detection and spectroscopy of exoplanets over a broad spectral range. Our team is working towards demonstrating contrast performance commensurate with imaging temperate,…
The detection and characterization of Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars for future flagship missions requires coronagraphs to achieve contrasts on the order of 1e-10 at close angular separations and over large spectral bandwidths…
For direct imaging of exoplanets, Scalar Vortex Coronagraphs (SVCs) are an attractive alternative to the popularly used Vector Vortex Coronagraphs (VVCs). This is primarily because they are able to induce the same phase ramp regardless of…
The unparalleled theoretical performance of an ideal vector vortex coronagraph makes it one of the most promising technologies for directly imaging exoplanets with a future, off-axis space telescope. However, the image contrast required for…
Several coronagraph designs have been proposed over the last two decades to directly image exoplanets. Among these designs, the vector vortex coronagraphs provide theoretically perfect starlight cancellation along with small inner working…
We propose a high-contrast coronagraph for direct imaging of young Jupiter-like planets orbiting nearby bright stars. The coronagraph employs a step-transmission filter in which the intensity is apodized with a finite number of steps of…
High-contrast coronagraphy will be needed to image and characterize faint extra-solar planetary systems. Coronagraphy is a rapidly evolving field, and many enhanced alternatives to the classical Lyot coronagraph have been proposed in the…
With a clear circular aperture, the vortex coronagraph perfectly cancels an on-axis point source and offers a 0.9 or 1.75 lambda/D inner working angle for topological charge 2 or 4, respectively. Current and near-future large telescopes are…
The high-contrast coronagraph for direct imaging earth-like exoplanet at the visible needs a contrast of 10^(-10) at a small angular separation of 4 lambda/D or less. Here we report our recent laboratory experiment that is close to the…
This study is focused on the very high dynamic imaging field, specifically the direct observation of exoplanetary systems. The coronagraph is an essential technique for suppressing the star's light, making it possible to detect an exoplanet…
The vector vortex coronagraph (VVC) performance in the laboratory and in ground-based observatories has earned it a spot on the NASA mission concepts HabEx and LUVOIR. The VVC induces a phase ramp through the manipulation of the…
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) mission will require coronagraphs capable of suppressing starlight at the $\sim 10^{-10}$ contrast level to directly image exo-Earths. High contrast achromatic coronagraphic masks are the missing…
Achieving the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) goal of 10^-10 contrast at a separation of 3 $\lambda$/D across a 20% bandwidth requires coronagraph focal plane masks with both broadband high contrast performance and high planet…
The spectroscopy of faint planetary-mass companions to nearby stars is one of the main challenges that new-generation high-contrast spectro-imagers are going to face. In a previous work we presented a long slit coronagraph (LSC), for which…
Direct imaging and spectroscopy of Earth-like planets and young Jupiters require contrasts up to 10^6-10^10 at angular separations of a few dozen milliarcseconds. To achieve this goal, one of the most promising approaches consists of using…