Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization on centrally obscured pupils: design and first laboratory demonstration for the Subaru Telescope pupil

Abstract

High contrast coronagraphic imaging is challenging for telescopes with central obstructions and thick spider vanes, such as the Subaru Telescope. We present in this paper the first laboratory demonstration of a high efficiency PIAA-type coronagraph on such a pupil, using coronagraphic optics which will be part of the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme-AO (SCExAO) system currently under assembly. Lossless pupil apodization is performed by a set of aspheric PIAA lenses specifically designed to also remove the pupil's central obstruction, coupled with a Spider Removal Plate (SRP) which removes spider vanes by translating four parts of the pupil with tilted plane-parallel plates. An "inverse-PIAA" system, located after the coronagraphic focal plane mask, is used to remove off-axis aberrations and deliver a wide field of view. Our results validate the concept adopted for the SCExAO system, and show that the Subaru Telescope pupil can properly be apodized for high contrast coronagraphic imaging as close as $\approx$ 1 $\lambda /D$ with no loss of sensitivity. We also verify that off-axis aberrations in the system are in agreement with theory, and that the inverse PIAA system recovers a wide usable field of view for exoplanet detection and disks imaging.

29 pages format AASTeX, 12 figures, PASP, accepted

Cited by in corpus (15)

• The Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics system: enabling high-contrast imaging on solar-system scales
• High Performance Lyot and PIAA Coronagraphy for Arbitrarily shaped Telescope Apertures
• Efficient injection from large telescopes into single-mode fibres: Enabling the era of ultra-precision astronomy
• High Contrast Imaging with an Arbitrary Aperture: Active Correction of Aperture Discontinuities
• Ring-apodized vortex coronagraphs for obscured telescopes. I. Transmissive ring apodizers
• Starlight Demonstration of the Dragonfly Instrument: an Integrated Photonic Pupil Remapping Interferometer for High Contrast Imaging
• Speckle Control with a remapped-pupil PIAA-coronagraph
• Demonstration of an efficient, photonic-based astronomical spectrograph on an 8-m telescope
• Astrophotonics: astronomy and modern optics
• Coronagraphic Low Order Wave Front Sensor : post-processing sensitivity enhancer for high performance coronagraphs
• Kernel-phase analysis: aperture modeling prescriptions that minimize calibration errors
• A dual-mask coronagraph for observing faint companions to binary stars
• 3D-M3: High-spatial resolution spectroscopy with extreme AO and 3D printed micro-lenslets
• The Phase Induced Amplitude Apodizer and Nuller -- High transmission, high dispersion coronagraphy at 2λ/D
• Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization Complex Mask Coronagraph (PIAACMC) on-sky demonstration with MagAO-X