The coronagraphic Modal Wavefront Sensor: a hybrid focal-plane sensor for the high-contrast imaging of circumstellar environments

TL;DR

The paper introduces the coronagraphic Modal Wavefront Sensor (cMWS), a novel real-time wavefront correction tool that enhances high-contrast imaging of exoplanets by reducing quasi-static speckle noise at the source.

Contribution

It presents the design, simulation, and initial on-sky testing of the cMWS, demonstrating its ability to recover wavefront errors and improve contrast in high-contrast imaging systems.

Findings

Successfully recovers diffraction-limited performance within 2-10 iterations.

Achieves wavefront aberration retrieval accuracy of 10nm RMS.

Capable of real-time atmospheric wavefront measurement at 50Hz.

Abstract

The raw coronagraphic performance of current high-contrast imaging instruments is limited by the presence of a quasi-static speckle (QSS) background, resulting from instrumental non-common path errors (NCPEs). Rapid development of efficient speckle subtraction techniques in data reduction has enabled final contrasts of up to 10-6 to be obtained, however it remains preferable to eliminate the underlying NCPEs at the source. In this work we introduce the coronagraphic Modal Wavefront Sensor (cMWS), a new wavefront sensor suitable for real-time NCPE correction. This pupil-plane optic combines the apodizing phase plate coronagraph with a holographic modal wavefront sensor, to provide simultaneous coronagraphic imaging and focal-plane wavefront sensing using the science point spread function. We first characterise the baseline performance of the cMWS via idealised closed-loop simulations, showing that the sensor successfully recovers diffraction-limited coronagraph performance over an effective dynamic range of +/-2.5 radians root-mean-square (RMS) wavefront error within 2-10 iterations. We then present the results of initial on-sky testing at the William Herschel Telescope, and demonstrate that the sensor is able to retrieve injected wavefront aberrations to an accuracy of 10nm RMS under realistic seeing conditions. We also find that the cMWS is capable of real-time broadband measurement of atmospheric wavefront variance at a cadence of 50Hz across an uncorrected telescope sub-aperture. When combined with a suitable closed-loop adaptive optics system, the cMWS holds the potential to deliver an improvement in raw contrast of up to two orders of magnitude over the uncorrected QSS floor. Such a sensor would be eminently suitable for the direct imaging and spectroscopy of exoplanets with both existing and future instruments, including EPICS and METIS for the E-ELT.