First experimental results of the fast atmospheric self-coherent camera technique on the Santa Cruz extreme adaptive optics laboratory testbed: demonstration of high speed focal plane wavefront control of residual atmospheric speckles
التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان:
First experimental results of the fast atmospheric self-coherent camera technique on the Santa Cruz extreme adaptive optics laboratory testbed: demonstration of high speed focal plane wavefront control of residual atmospheric speckles
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 habitable-zone exoplanets. However, continually evolving speckles in the coronagraphic science image still limit state-of-the-art ground-based exoplanet imaging instruments to contrasts at least two orders of magnitude worse than what is needed to achieve this goal. For ground-based adaptive optics (AO) instruments it remains challenging for most speckle suppression techniques to attenuate both the dynamic atmospheric and quasi-static instrumental speckles. We have proposed a focal plane wavefront sensing and control algorithm to address this challenge, called the Fast Atmospheric Self-coherent camera (SCC) Technique (FAST), which enables the SCC to operate down to millisecond timescales even when only a few photons are detected per speckle. Here we present preliminary experimental results of FAST on the Santa Cruz Extreme AO Laboratory (SEAL) testbed, demonstrating closed-loop focal plane wavefront control on millisecond-timescales.
