Related papers: High Speed Focal Plane Wavefront Sensing with an O…
Context. The next generation of space-borne instruments dedicated to the direct detection of exoplanets requires unprecedented levels of wavefront control precision. Coronagraphic wavefront sensing techniques for these instruments must…
The search for exoplanets is pushing adaptive optics systems on ground-based telescopes to their limits. Currently, we are limited by two sources of noise: the temporal control error and non-common path aberrations. First, the temporal…
The James Webb Space Telescope is orders of magnitude more sensitive than any other facility across the near to mid-infrared wavelengths. Many approved programs take advantage of its highly stable point spread function (PSF) to directly…
The nonlinear curvature wavefront sensor (nlCWFS) uses multiple (typically four) out-of-focus images to reconstruct the phase and amplitude of a propagating light beam. Because these images are located between the pupil and focal planes,…
Adaptive optics (AO) is a technique allowing to drastically improve ground-based telescopes angular resolution. The wavefront sensor (WFS) is one of the key components of such systems, driving the fundamental performance limitations. In…
Wavefront sensing is a set of techniques providing efficient means to ascertain the shape of an optical wavefront or its deviation from an ideal reference. Due to its wide dynamical range and high optical efficiency, the Shack-Hartmann is…
Directly observing exoplanets with coronagraphs is impeded by the presence of speckles from aberrations in the optical path, which can be mitigated in hardware with wavefront control as well as in post-processing. This work explores using…
Adaptive optics (AO) is a technique to improve the resolution of ground-based telescopes by correcting, in real-time, optical aberrations due to atmospheric turbulence and the telescope itself. With the rise of Giant Segmented Mirror…
High throughput, low inner working angle (IWA) phase masks coronagraphs are essential to directly image and characterize (via spectroscopy) earth-like planets. However, the performance of low-IWA coronagraphs is limited by residual pointing…
The Multiconjugate Adaptive optics Demonstrator (MAD) for ESO-Very Large Telescopes (VLT) will demonstrate on sky the MultiConjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) technique. In this paper the laboratory tests relative to the first preliminary…
SAXO+ is a planned enhancement of the existing SAXO, the VLT/ SPHERE adaptive optics system, deployed on ESO's Very Large Telescope. This upgrade is designed to significantly enhance the instrument's capacity to detect and analyze young…
Astronomical telescopes suffer from a tradeoff between field of view (FoV) and image resolution: increasing the FoV leads to an optical field that is under-sampled by the science camera. This work presents a novel computational imaging…
High-contrast imaging (HCI) observations of exoplanets can be limited by the island effect (IE). On the current generation of telescopes, the IE becomes a severe problem when the ground wind speed is below a few meters per second. This is…
The sensitivity of the the pyramid wavefront sensor (PyWFS) has made it a popular choice for astronomical adaptive optics (AAO) systems, and it is at its most sensitive when it is used without modulation of the input beam. In non-modulated…
We present numerical characterizations of the wavefront sensing performance for few-mode photonic lantern wavefront sensors (PLWFSs). These characterizations include calculations of throughput, control space, sensor linearity, and an…
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…
The Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL) testbed is an optical bench meant to design and develop new wavefront control techniques for high-contrast imaging for segmented telescopes. These techniques allow for astronomical efficiency in…
The Future wireless communication systems face the challenging task of simultaneously providing high quality of service (QoS) and broadband data transmission, while also minimizing power consumption, latency, and system complexity. Although…
This paper is the third part of a trilogy dealing with the principles, performance and limitations of what I named "Telescope-Interferometers" (TIs). The basic idea consists in transforming one telescope into a Wavefront Error (WFE) sensing…
The next generation of large telescopes for direct imaging of exoplanets will require segmented primary mirrors. Over both long and short timescales, these telescopes experience segment misalignments which degrade the final science image.…