Abstract
A nulling interferometer was proposed to achieve direct detection of extra-solar planets (exoplanets) by suppressing light from the central star using a pair of telescopes. Recently, the stellar coronagraph method has shown rapid progress, which uses an extended concept of the nulling interferometer within single telescope optics. A dynamic range larger than 1 × 109 for the detection of Earth-like exoplanets can be attained by reducing diffraction patterns using the nulling coronagraph, and by suppressing speckle noise using an adaptive optics with an accuracy of λ/10000 rms. An unbalanced nulling interferometer (UNI), which is used as fore-optics, improves the wavefront sensing sensitivity and compensation level of the adaptive optics by a factor of 10. Consequently, the dynamic range of the coronagraph can also be improved by two orders of magnitude. The UNI is composed of a modified coronagraph or a traditional interferometer and magnifies the aberrations of incoming wavefronts.
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