Related papers: EMCCD for Pyramid wavefront sensor: laboratory cha…
CMOS detectors offer many advantages over CCDs for optical and UV astronomical applications, especially in space where high radiation tolerance is required. However, astronomical instruments are most often designed for low light-level…
The next generation of giant ground and space telescopes will have the light-collecting power to detect and characterize potentially habitable terrestrial exoplanets using high-contrast imaging for the first time. This will only be…
The observation of spatial quantum noise reduction, or spatial squeezing, with a large number of photons can lead to a significant advantage in quantum imaging and quantum metrology due to the scaling of the signal-to-noise ratio with the…
Commonly used wavefront sensors, the Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor and the pyramid wavefront sensor, for example, have large dynamic range or high sensitivity, trading one regime for the other. A new type of wavefront sensor is being…
There are scientific and technological needs to improve the co-phasing of the primary mirrors of segmented telescopes. We have developed a methodology for using the wavefront sensor of an adaptive optics (AO) system to disentangle the phase…
Exoplanet imaging has thus far enabled studies of wide-orbit ($>$10 AU) giant planet ($>$2 Jupiter masses) formation and giant planet atmospheres, with future 30 meter-class Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) needed to image and characterize…
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…
While multi-modal 3D semantic occupancy prediction typically enhances robustness by fusing camera and LiDAR inputs, its effectiveness is fundamentally constrained by environmental variability. Specifically, camera sensors suffer from severe…
As the precision frontier of astrophysics advances towards the one millimagnitude level, flux calibration of photometric instrumentation remains an ongoing challenge. We present the results of a lab-bench assessment of the viability of…
Ground-based high contrast imaging (HCI) and extreme adaptive optics (AO) technologies have advanced to the point of enabling direct detections of gas-giant exoplanets orbiting beyond the snow lines around nearby young star systems.…
Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that offer advantages over traditional cameras. They operate asynchronously, sampling the scene at microsecond resolution and producing a stream of brightness changes. This unconventional output has…
High contrast imaging and spectroscopy provide unique constraints for exoplanet formation models as well as for planetary atmosphere models. But this can be challenging because of the planet-to-star small angular separation and high flux…
Current and future high contrast imaging instruments aim to detect exoplanets at closer orbital separations, lower masses, and/or older ages than their predecessors, with the eventual goal of directly detecting terrestrial-mass…
METIS, the Mid-Infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph, is one of the four first-generation ELT instruments scheduled to see first light in 2028. Its two main science modules are supported by an adaptive optics system featuring a pyramid…
Quantum dot sensitized solar cells are among the new generations of solar cells that have attracted much attention. Theoretical and simulation studies have predicted high efficiency for these cells so that in the future, these cells could…
We have designed and built a new type of CCD that we call an orthogonal transfer CCD (OTCCD), which permits parallel clocking horizontally as well as vertically. The device has been used successfully to remove image motion caused by…
The quantum efficiency and reflectivity of thick, back-illuminated CCD's being fabricated at LBNL for astronomical applications are modeled and compared with experiment. The treatment differs from standard thin-film optics in that (a)…
One of the basic parameters of a CCD camera is its gain, i.e. the number of detected electrons per output Analogue to Digital Unit (ADU). This is normally determined by finding the statistical variances from a series of flat-field exposures…
Combining complementary sensor modalities is crucial to providing robust perception for safety-critical robotics applications such as autonomous driving (AD). Recent state-of-the-art camera-lidar fusion methods for AD rely on monocular…
Current designs for all three extremely large telescopes show the overwhelming adoption of the pyramid wavefront sensor (P-WFS) as the WFS of choice for adaptive optics (AO) systems sensing on natural guide stars (NGS) or extended objects.…