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The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), currently scheduled to launch in 2021, will dramatically advance our understanding of exoplanetary systems with its ability to directly image and characterise planetary-mass companions at wide…
The Rayleigh diffraction limit imposes a fundamental restriction on the resolution of direct imaging systems, hindering the identification of incoherent optical sources, such as celestial bodies in astronomy and fluorophores in bioimaging.…
Direct detection and detailed characterization of exoplanets using extreme adaptive optics (ExAO) is a key science goal of future extremely large telescopes (ELTs). However, wavefront errors will limit the sensitivity of this endeavor.…
Stellar coronagraph performance is highly sensitive to optical aberrations. In order to effectively suppress starlight for exoplanet imaging applications, low-order wavefront aberrations entering a coronagraph such as tip-tilt, defocus and…
Context. Several exoplanet direct imaging instruments will soon be in operation. They use an extreme adaptive optics (XAO) system to correct the atmospheric turbulence and provide a highly-corrected beam to a near-infrared (NIR) coronagraph…
Instrumental aberrations strongly limit high-contrast imaging of exoplanets, especially when they produce quasistatic speckles in the science images. With the help of recent advances in deep learning, we have developed in previous works an…
Future high-contrast imaging spectroscopy with a large segmented telescope will be able to detect atmospheric molecules of Earth-like planets around G- or K-type main-sequence stars. Increasing the number of target planets will require a…
Direct imaging of exoplanets represents a challenge for astronomical instrumentation due to the high-contrast ratio and small angular separation between the host star and the faint planet. Multi-star systems pose additional challenges for…
Resolving fine details of astronomical objects provides critical insights into their underlying physical processes. This drives in part the desire to construct ever-larger telescopes and interferometer arrays and to observe at shorter…
Directly imaging Earth-like exoplanets within habitable zones is challenging because faint signals can be obscured by exozodiacal dust, analogous to our solar system's zodiacal dust. This dust scatters starlight, creating a bright…
NASA's Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) aims to achieve starlight suppression to the $10^{-10}$ level for the detection and spectral characterization of Earth-like exoplanets. Broadband ozone absorption features are key biosignatures that…
A high contrast coronagraph is expected to provide one of the promising ways to directly observe extra-solar planets. We present the newest results of our laboratory experiment investigating "rigid" coronagraph with a binary shaped…
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…
High-contrast imaging from space must overcome two major noise sources to successfully detect a terrestrial planet angularly close to its parent star: photon noise from diffracted star light, and speckle noise from star light scattered by…
A recently identified class of receivers which demultiplex an optical field into a set of orthogonal spatial modes prior to detection can surpass canonical diffraction limits on spatial resolution for simple incoherent imaging tasks.…
Context. Since 1995 and the first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a main-sequence star, 4000 exoplanets have been discovered using several techniques. However, only a few of these exoplanets were detected through direct imaging. Indeed,…
Oncoming exoplanet spectro-imagers like the Planetary Camera and Spectrograph (PCS) for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) will aim for a new class of exoplanets, including Earth-like planets evolving around M dwarfs i.e., closer than…
Potentially habitable planets around nearby stars less massive than solar-type stars could join targets of the spectroscopy of the planetary reflected light with future space telescopes. However, the orbits of most of these planets occur…
Because of bright starlight leakage in coronagraphic raw images, faint astrophysical objects such as exoplanets can only be detected using powerful point spread function (PSF) subtraction algorithms. However, these algorithms have strong…
Context. Phase-mask coronagraphy is advantageous in terms of inner working angle and discovery space. It is however still plagued by drawbacks such as sensitivity to tip-tilt errors and chromatism. A nulling stellar coronagraph based on the…