TY - JOUR
T1 - Shaped pupil Lyot coronagraphs
T2 - High-contrast solutions for restricted focal planes
AU - Zimmerman, Neil T.
AU - Eldorado Riggs, A. J.
AU - Jeremy Kasdin, N.
AU - Carlotti, Alexis
AU - Vanderbei, Robert J.
N1 - Funding Information:
We are grateful to Mamadou N''Diaye and Rémi Soummer for helpful suggestions and conversations about coronagraph design. We also thank Wesley A. Traub for providing us with his program to estimate the separation-contrast distribution of radial velocity planets. This work was partially funded by NASA Technology Development for Exoplanet Missions Grant Number NNX09AB96G and by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology. A. J. E. Riggs is supported by NASA Grant Number NNX14AM06H, a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship. Robert J. Vanderbei acknowledges research support from the Office of Naval Research.
Publisher Copyright:
© The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
PY - 2016/1/1
Y1 - 2016/1/1
N2 - Coronagraphs of the apodized pupil and shaped pupil varieties use the Fraunhofer diffraction properties of amplitude masks to create regions of high contrast in the vicinity of a target star. Here we present a hybrid coronagraph architecture in which a binary, hard-edged shaped pupil mask replaces the gray, smooth apodizer of the apodized pupil Lyot coronagraph (APLC). For any contrast and bandwidth goal in this configuration, as long as the prescribed region of contrast is restricted to a finite area in the image, a shaped pupil is the apodizer with the highest transmission. We relate the starlight cancellation mechanism to that of the conventional APLC. We introduce a new class of solutions in which the amplitude profile of the Lyot stop, instead of being fixed as a padded replica of the telescope aperture, is jointly optimized with the apodizer. Finally, we describe shaped pupil Lyot coronagraph (SPLC) designs for the baseline architecture of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope - Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets (WFIRST-AFTA) coronagraph. These SPLCs help to enable two scientific objectives of the WFIRST-AFTA mission: (1) broadband spectroscopy to characterize exoplanet atmospheres in reflected starlight and (2) debris disk imaging.
AB - Coronagraphs of the apodized pupil and shaped pupil varieties use the Fraunhofer diffraction properties of amplitude masks to create regions of high contrast in the vicinity of a target star. Here we present a hybrid coronagraph architecture in which a binary, hard-edged shaped pupil mask replaces the gray, smooth apodizer of the apodized pupil Lyot coronagraph (APLC). For any contrast and bandwidth goal in this configuration, as long as the prescribed region of contrast is restricted to a finite area in the image, a shaped pupil is the apodizer with the highest transmission. We relate the starlight cancellation mechanism to that of the conventional APLC. We introduce a new class of solutions in which the amplitude profile of the Lyot stop, instead of being fixed as a padded replica of the telescope aperture, is jointly optimized with the apodizer. Finally, we describe shaped pupil Lyot coronagraph (SPLC) designs for the baseline architecture of the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope - Astrophysics Focused Telescope Assets (WFIRST-AFTA) coronagraph. These SPLCs help to enable two scientific objectives of the WFIRST-AFTA mission: (1) broadband spectroscopy to characterize exoplanet atmospheres in reflected starlight and (2) debris disk imaging.
KW - coronagraph
KW - exoplanets
KW - high-contrast imaging
KW - space telescope
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U2 - 10.1117/1.JATIS.2.1.011012
DO - 10.1117/1.JATIS.2.1.011012
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:84955089783
SN - 2329-4124
VL - 2
JO - Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems
JF - Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems
IS - 1
M1 - 011012
ER -