Boundary diffraction wave integrals for diffraction modeling of external occulters

Abstract

An occulter is a large diffracting screen which may be flown in conjunction with a telescope to image extrasolar planets. The edge is shaped to minimize the diffracted light in a region beyond the occulter, and a telescope may be placed in this dark shadow to view an extrasolar system with the starlight removed. Errors in position, orientation, and shape of the occulter will diffract additional light into this region, and a challenge of modeling an occulter system is to accurately and quickly model these effects. We present a fast method for the calculation of electric fields following an occulter, based on the concept of the boundary diffraction wave: the 2D structure of the occulter is reduced to a 1D edge integral which directly incorporates the occulter shape, and which can be easily adjusted to include changes in occulter position and shape, as well as the effects of sources---such as exoplanets---which arrive off-axis to the occulter. The structure of a typical implementation of the algorithm is included.

13 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Fast computation of Lyot-style coronagraph propagation
• Optimal Occulter Design for Finding Extrasolar Planets
• The Big Occulting Steerable Satellite (BOSS)

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Optical Verification Experiments of Sub-scale Starshades
• Implementing non-scalar diffraction in Fourier optics via the Braunbek method
• Analytical Boundary-Based Method for Diffraction Calculations
• Efficient high-order accurate Fresnel diffraction via areal quadrature and the nonuniform FFT
• Computation of the Fresnel diffraction of starshades based on a polygonal approximation
• Guest Editorial: Overview of the Special Issue and a Dialog on Starshades
• A comparison of solar and stellar coronagraphs that make use of external occulters