Optimal Fourier control performance and speckle behavior in high-contrast imaging with adaptive optics

Advancing High - Contrast Adaptive Optics

A long-standing challenge has been to directly image faint extrasolar planets adjacent to their host suns, which may be 10 – 10 times brighter than the planet. Several extreme AO systems designed for high-contrast observations have been tested at this point, including SPHERE, Magellan AO, PALM-3000, Project 1640, NICI, and the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI). The GPI is the world’s most advanced hig...

High Contrast Imaging with Polycapillary Optics

Polycapillary x-ray optics provide an innovative new way to control x-ray beams. Placing these optics after the object to be imaged provides very efficient rejection of Compton scatter, while allowing image magnification without loss of resolution, image demagnification, or image shaping to match with digital detectors. An extensive study of the effects of surface and profile defects have great...

Limits of Adaptive Optics for high contrast imaging

The effects of photon noise, aliasing, wavefront chromaticity and scintillation on the point spread function (PSF) contrast achievable with ground based adaptive optics (AO) are evaluated for different wavefront sensing schemes. I show that a wavefront sensor (WFS) based upon the Zernike phase contrast technique offers the best sensitivity to photon noise at all spatial frequencies, while the S...

Diffraction, Fourier Optics and Imaging

Data-Driven Optimal Control for Adaptive Optics