Focal Plane Wavefront Sensing with the FAST TGV Coronagraph

Abstract

The continual push to directly image exoplanets at lower masses and closer separations orbiting around bright stars remains limited by both quasi-static and residual adaptive optics aberration. In previous papers we have proposed a modification of the self-coherent camera (SCC) design to address both of these limitations, called the Fast Atmospheric SCC Technique (FAST). In this paper we introduce an additional modification to the FAST focal plane mask design, including the existing Tip/tilt and Gaussian components and adding a charge four Vortex (TGV) component. In addition to boosting SCC fringe signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) as in our previous design, we show that the FAST TGV mask is also optimized to reach high contrast at separations closer to the star. In this paper we use numerical simulations to consider the performance improvement on correcting quasi-static aberration using this new mask compared to the previously proposed Tip/tilt+Gaussian mask. Using active deformable mirror control to generate a calibrated half dark hole improves contrast by a factor of about 200 at 2–5 λ/D and up to a factor of 10 at 5–20 λ/D. The new methodology presented in this paper, now simultaneously considering both contrast and fringe S/N, opens the door to a new ideology of coronagraph design, where the coronagraph is now considered in duality as both a diffraction attenuator and a wavefront sensor.