Vortex coronagraphs for the Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx) concept: theoretical performance and telescope requirements

TL;DR

This paper evaluates vortex coronagraphs for the HabEx mission, highlighting their advantages in starlight suppression, throughput, and robustness to aberrations on off-axis telescopes, suitable for imaging Earth-like exoplanets.

Contribution

It provides a theoretical analysis of vortex coronagraph performance and telescope requirements, demonstrating their suitability for HabEx's broad spectral and stability needs.

Findings

Vortex coronagraphs passively reject low-order aberrations, relaxing wavefront stability requirements.

They can sufficiently suppress stars with large angular diameters.

Achieve >10% planet throughput even in segmented telescope architectures.

Abstract

The Habitable Exoplanet Imaging Mission (HabEx) concept requires an optical coronagraph that provides deep starlight suppression over a broad spectral bandwidth, high throughput for point sources at small angular separation, and insensitivity to temporally-varying, low-order aberrations. Vortex coronagraphs are a promising solution that perform optimally on off-axis, monolithic telescopes and may also be designed for segmented telescopes with minor losses in performance. We describe the key advantages of vortex coronagraphs on off-axis telescopes: 1) Unwanted diffraction due to aberrations is passively rejected in several low-order Zernike modes relaxing the wavefront stability requirements for imaging Earth-like planets from <10 to >100 pm rms. 2) Stars with angular diameters >0.1 $\lambda/D$ may be sufficiently suppressed. 3) The absolute planet throughput is >10%, even for unfavorable telescope architectures. 4) Broadband solutions ($\Delta\lambda/\lambda>0.1$) are readily available for both monolithic and segmented apertures. The latter make use of grayscale apodizers in an upstream pupil plane to provide suppression of diffracted light from amplitude discontinuities in the telescope pupil without inducing additional stroke on the deformable mirrors. We set wavefront stability requirements on the telescope, based on a stellar irradiance threshold set at an angular separation of 3$\pm$0.5 $\lambda/D$ from the star, and discuss how some requirements may be relaxed by trading robustness to aberrations for planet throughput.