High contrast experiment of an AO-free coronagraph with a checkerboard pupil mask
K. Enya, L. Abe, S. Tanaka, T. Nakagawa, K. Haze, T. Sato, T. Wakayama

TL;DR
This study demonstrates a high contrast, AO-free coronagraph using a checkerboard pupil mask, achieving significant contrast levels suitable for space-based exoplanet observation without adaptive optics.
Contribution
The paper presents the design, fabrication, and laboratory testing of a binary checkerboard pupil mask for a rigid coronagraph, achieving high contrast without adaptive wavefront correction.
Findings
Achieved raw contrast of 6.7 x 10^-8 in laboratory tests.
Post-PSF subtraction contrast improved to 6.8 x 10^-9.
Speckles limited the contrast performance in the dark regions.
Abstract
A high contrast coronagraph is expected to provide one of the promising ways to directly observe extra-solar planets. We present the newest results of our laboratory experiment investigating "rigid" coronagraph with a binary shaped checkerboard pupil mask, which should offer a highly stable solution for telescopes without adaptive optics (AO) for wavefront correction in space missions. The primary aim of this work was to study the stability of the coronagraph, and to demonstrate its performance without adaptive wavefront correction. Estimation of both the raw contrast and the gain of the point spread function (PSF) subtraction were needed. The limiting factor of the contrast was also important. A binary shaped pupil mask of a checkerboard type has been designed. The mask, consisting of an aluminum film on a glass substrate, was manufactured using nano-fabrication techniques with…
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