Apodized phase mask coronagraphs for arbitrary apertures

Abstract

Phase masks coronagraphs can be seen as linear systems that spatially redistribute, in the pupil plane, the energy collected by the telescope. Most of the on-axis light must ideally be rejected outside the aperture to be blocked with a Lyot stop, while almost all off-axis light must go through it. The unobstructed circular apertures of off-axis telescopes make this possible but all major telescopes are however on-axis and the performance of these coronagraphs is dramatically reduced by the central obstruction. Their performance can be restored by using an additional optimally designed apodizer that changes the amplitude in the first pupil plane so that the on-axis light is rejected outside the obstructed aperture of the telescope. The numerical optimization model is built by maximizing the apodizer's transmission while setting constraints on the extremum values of the electric field that the Lyot stop does not block. The coronagraphic image is compared to what a non-apodized phase mask coronagraph provides and an analysis is made of the trade-offs that exist between the apodizer transmission and the Lyot stop properties. The existence of a solution and the mask transmission depend on the aperture and the Lyot stop geometries, and on the constraints that are set on the on-axis attenuation. The system throughput is a concave function of the Lyot stop transmission. In the case of a VLT-like aperture, apodizers with a transmission of 0.16 to 0.92 associated with a four-quadrant phase mask provide contrast as low as a few 1e-10 at 1 lambda/D from the star. The system's maximum throughput is 0.64, for an apodizer with an 0.88 transmission and a Lyot stop with a 0.69 transmission. Optimizing apodizers for a vortex phase mask requires computation times much longer than in the previous case, and no result is presented for this mask.

16 pages

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