High-contrast imaging with a self-coherent camera

Abstract

Direct imaging of exoplanets is very challenging because the planet is 104 to 1010 fainter than the star at a separation of a fraction of arcsec. Several coronagraphs have been proposed to reduce the contrast ratio but their performance strongly depends on the level of phase and amplitude aberrations that induce speckles in the science image. An active control of the aberrations and a posteriori calibration are thus required to reach very high contrasts. Classical adaptive optics are not sufficient for this purpose because of non-common path aberrations. Our team proposed a self-coherent camera that spatially modulates the speckles in the science image. It is then possible to both actively control a deformable mirror and calibrate the residuals a posteriori. The current paper is an overview of the developments we have been working on for 7 years. We present the principle of the self-coherent camera, laboratory performance obtained in monochromatic light, and upgrades of the technique to make it achromatic.