Combining focal plane wavefront control, coherence differential imaging and spectral differential imaging with the Spectral Modulated Self-Coherent Camera (SM-SCC)

Abstract

The detection and characterization of Earth-like exoplanets is one of the major science drivers for the next generation of telescopes. Current direct imaging instruments are limited by evolving Non Common Path Aberrations (NCPA). A promising sensor is the Self Coherent Camera (SCC) that uses a pinhole in the Lyot plane to modulate the focal plane electric field. However, the SCC has low throughput due to the large separation between the pinhole and the edge of the pupil. The spectrally modulated Self Coherent Camera solves this issue by modulating the pinhole along the spectral direction. The SM-SCC can place the pinhole directly at the edge of the pupil which increases the throughput by a factor of 100. This allows the SM-SCC to go faster or use it on fainter objects that the SCC. Here we present the concept of the SM-SCC and show that it can be used for focal plane wavefront control, Coherence Differential Imaging (CDI) and Spectral Differential Imaging (SDI).