The Subaru Pathfinder Instrument for Detecting Exoplanets and Recovering Spectra (SPIDERS) has been built from the ground-up to demonstrate the fast-atmospheric self-coherent camera technique on-sky for the first time. This technique uses a common-path interferometer to measure and suppress speckles in real-time to build a dark hole, and to enable hyperspectral coherent differential imaging post-processing. These promise more than a hundred times improvement in sensitivity to young giant planets and debris disks around bright stars compared with previous, speckle-limited instruments. We will present SPIDERS, its laboratory performance on post-AO residuals, and an update on SPIDERS’ commissioning at Subaru.
The imaging search for exoplanets is mainly limited by quasi-static speckle noise that have lifetimes between milliseconds and hours. Attempts to remove this noise using post-processing by building a point spread function (PSF) model from diversity in time, wavelength, and so-forth are limited to a small improvement due to the evolution of the noise along these same axes. The Calibration 2 (CAL2) system, being built by an international team, is a National Research Council of Canada (NRC) funded facility-class focal plane wavefront sensor for the Gemini Planet Imager 2 (GPI2) upgrade. The project consists of a complete rebuild of the GPI calibration (CAL) system. Based on the self-coherent camera concept and the FAST focal plane mask, a fraction of the near-infrared (NIR) science bandpass is extracted using a new dichroic wheel to perform focal plane wavefront sensing, with the goal to do science while also improving the contrast for the GPI2 IFS, up to a factor of 100x on bright stars. The project is at the final design review stage, and construction is expected to start summer/fall 2024, with assembly late fall 2024, and shipping to the Gemini North observatory middle of 2025.
Diffractive optical elements (DOEs) gradually start replacing traditional refractive optics in many applications. The growing interest in DOEs is mainly because of their flexibility in light manipulation with a small form factor and their ability to combine simultaneously optical and computational functions into a single part by applying the software-hardware co-design approach. Two main methods are widely used to fabricate DOEs. The first method is the etched-based method that combines photolithography and reactive-ion etching (RIE). The second method is additive fabrication, which combines metal deposition and nanoimprinting (NIL). Both methods have many drawbacks. The RIE methods suffer from issues like lags in the etched depth when the feature sizes differ in the same pattern (RIE lags), high surface roughness, and aspect ratio-dependent etching rate. The second method could produce high-resolution micro-optics. However, the technique could suffer from poor adhesion of the patterns with the substrate and poor uniformity across large areas. Here we propose a new way to fabricate multi-level DOEs by directly growing an optically transparent material on a glass substrate. The method combines the deposition of Silicon dioxide (SiO2) by Plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition technique (PECVD) and bi-layer lift-off. We provide evidence of the effectiveness of the fabrication method by comparing a 16-level Fresnel lens fabricated by the RIE method with another lens fabricated by the proposed method. The characterization results show that with the proposed method, the surface roughness is lower, and the depth is uniform. Furthermore, the optical test shows a reduced haze effect.
Facility-class high-contrast exoplanet imaging systems are currently limited by non-common path quasi-static speckles. Due to these aberrations, the raw contrast saturates after a few seconds. Several active wavefront correction techniques have been developed to remove this noise, with limited success. The NRC Canada is funding two projects, the SPIDERS pathfinder at the Subaru telescope (ETA 2023), and the CAL2 upgrade of the Gemini Planet Imager-2 (ETA 2024), to deploy a modified self-coherent camera (based on FAST) to measure the focal plane electric field, and to apply wavefront corrections in a closed-loop down to 10s of ms in a narrow band. The CAL2 project will focus on developing a facilityclass focal plane & Lyot-stop Low-order sensors using a CRED2 and a SAPHIRA-based camera, reaching up to a gain of 100x in contrast for bright stars. The SPIDERS pathfinder will have a similar configuration with the addition of an imaging Fourier transform spectrograph, allowing the acquisition of a 3.3” diagonal FOV to up to R-20,000 in the NIR to perform advanced spectral differential imaging at a high-spectral resolution to search and characterize exoplanets. These projects will serve as the foundation to develop similar systems for future ground-/space-based telescopes, and be an important step toward the development of instruments to search for life signatures in the atmosphere of exoplanets.
In order to detect low mass and mature planets inwards of approximately 5 AU, future direct imaging instruments will require precision wavefront control that operates at relatively high speed. The self-coherent camera (SCC) is a promising technique for measuring the wavefront from science images at the focal plane. We present here results from NRC’s NEW-EARTH lab testing of the Fast Atmospheric SCC Technique, a variant of the SCC and its integration with a Lyot-stop Low-Order Wavefront Sensor. We demonstrate correction of quasi-static speckles in a half dark hole reaching raw 1σ contrasts on the order of 5 × 10−7 at 10 λ/D. We also present a simplified process for extracting measurements and/or DM commands from SCC images using a single matrixvector multiply. This testing and development are important steps on the way to the upcoming Subaru Pathfinder Instrument for Detection of Exoplanets and Removal of Speckles and the Gemini Planet Imager’s CAL2 upgrade.
Ground-based high contrast imaging (HCI) and extreme adaptive optics (AO) technologies have advanced to the point of enabling direct detections of gas-giant exoplanets orbiting beyond the snow lines around nearby young star systems. However, leftover wavefront errors using current HCI and AO technologies, realized as “speckles” in the coronagraphic science image, still limit HCI instrument sensitivities to detecting and characterizing lowermass, closer-in, and/or older/colder exoplanetary systems. Improving the performance of AO wavefront sensors (WFSs) and control techniques is critical to improving such HCI instrument sensitivity. Here we present three different ongoing wavefront sensing and control project developments on the Santa cruz Extreme AO Laboratory (SEAL) testbed: (1) “multi-WFS single congugate AO (SCAO)” using the Fast Atmospheric Self-coherent camera (SCC) Technique (FAST) and a Shack Hartmann WFS, (2) pupil chopping for focal plane wavefront sensing, first with an external amplitude modulator and then with the DM as a phase-only modulator, and (3) a laboratory demonstration of enhanced linearity with the non-modulated bright Pyramid WFS (PWFS) compared to the regular PWFS. All three topics share a common theme of multi-WFS SCAO and/or second stage AO, presenting opportunities and applications to further investigate these techniques in the future.
NRC’s NEW-EARTH Lab has demonstrated in the laboratory a Self-Coherent Camera (SCC) concept combined with a Tilt-Gaussian-Vortex focal plane mask (FPM). This speckle suppression technique, a.k.a. Fast Atmospheric SCC Technique (FAST), can enhance the contrast up to 100 times. Based on this success, NRC is now building SPIDERS, a visitor instrument for Subaru telescope to be installed on the infrared Nasmyth platform behind AO188 and the new Subaru Beam Switcher. The beam can be either shared between SPIDERS and SCExAO for simultaneous observations or sent entirely to only one instrument. SPIDERS should also benefit from the upcoming AO188 deformable mirror (DM) upgrade (64x64 actuators) turning A188 to AO3k. The key-components of SPIDERS are an ALPAO DM468, used as a second-stage AO correction, a pupil apodizer mask, a Tilt-Gaussian FPM, a Lyot stop, a beam-splitter feeding (i), a C-RED2 camera imaging a 5” FoV in narrow bands and (ii), an imaging Fourier-Transform Spectrograph and a SAPHIRA camera for spectroscopy up to R~20,000 over a 3.3” FoV. SPIDERS optical design is fully reflective up to the FPM to avoid chromatic aberrations and reduce the number of surfaces. Two off-axis ellipsoid mirrors are enough to form the pupil planes required on the DM and the apodizer mask, and the f/64 focus on the FPM. Only lenses are used from the FPM up to the C-RED2 camera to mitigate the sensitivity of the SCC to vibrations. The Lyot stop reflects the blocked light to a camera acting as a Low-Order Wavefront Sensor complementing the SCC focal plane wavefront sensing.
Direct imaging of exoplanets can be used to characterize exoplanets by spectroscopy of their atmospheres. Coronagraphs are required to suppress the diffraction effects by blocking the starlight, however, residual wavefront error scatters starlight in the science images, losing faint exoplanet photons in stellar noise. The performance of a coronagraphic system is thus contingent upon how efficiently the wavefront aberrations are minimized. Lyot-stop low-order wavefront sensor (LLOWFS) is a well-established sensor that senses the light rejected by the focal plane mask and corrects low-order aberrations upstream of the coronagraph. Previous versions of the LLOWFS sensed the residual starlight at the defocused focal plane. However, on the NRC's NEW-EARTH high-contrast imaging testbed, pupil-plane images of LLOWFS have been used to address both Zernike and Fourier modes. The goal of the testbed is to develop SPIDERS/Subaru which is the technology demonstrator of the CAL2 unit of the upcoming Gemini Planet Imager 2.0 (GPI 2.0). Both SPIDERS and CAL2 will address the low-order modes for stabilizing speckles, and demonstrate an active suppression of speckles using the Fast Atmospheric Self-Coherent Camera Technique (FAST) by creating a region of up to 10-7 contrast at small angles. Thus, obtaining sub-nanometric pointing stability using the LLOWFS is crucial for achieving stable contrast results on the bench and on-sky. Here, we present LLOWFS closed-loop laboratory results under simulated post-Adaptive Optics residuals of GPI 2.0 and simulations of the LLOWFS and FAST sensors for SPIDERS.
We propose a lens design ray tracing engine that is derivative-aware, using automatic differentiation. This derivative-aware property enables the engine to infer gradients of current design parameters, i.e., how design parameters affect a given error metric (e.g., spot RMS or irradiance values), by back-propagating the derivatives through a computational graph via differentiable ray tracing. Our engine not only enables designers to employ gradient descent and variants for design optimization, but also provides a numerically compatible way to perform back-propagation on both the optical design and the post-processing algorithm (e.g., a neural network), making hardware-software end-to-end designs possible. Examples are demonstrated by freeform designs and joint optics-network optimization for extended-depth-of-field applications.
Spatially-varying features with uniform depths in large areas are challenging to achieve with etching based lithography. Here we propose an additive lithographic fabrication process to realize simultaneous presence of micrometer and millimeter features with low surface roughness. The etching step is replaced by sputter deposition and bi-layer lift-off to form the microstructures. Instead of removing materials, our method grows materials onto the substrate. We demonstrate its effectiveness with a reflective Tilt-Gaussian-Vortex mask with aluminum deposited on a fused silica substrate. The center has a diameter of 130 microns with minimum spacing of 2 microns, and the background pattern is 3 mm by 3 mm, with the largest flat region spanning 1.5 mm. A preliminary 4-level prototype has been tested in the Gemini Planet Imaging calibration unit upgrading project, and an improved 16-level sample has been measured. The results show uniform depth and surface roughness control in the whole area.
High-contrast imaging instruments have advanced techniques to improve contrast, but they remain limited by uncorrected stellar speckles, often lacking a “second stage” correction to complement the Adaptive Optics (AO) correction. We are implementing a new second stage speckle-correction solution for the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI), replacing the instrument calibration unit (CAL) with the Fast Atmospheric Self coherent camera Technique (FAST), a new version of the self-coherent camera (SCC) concept. Our proposed upgrade (CAL2.0) will use a common-path interferometer design to enable speckle correction, through post-processing and/or by a feedback loop to the AO deformable mirror. FAST utilizes a new type of coronagraphic mask that will enable, for the first time, speckle correction down to millisecond timescales. The system's main goal is to improve the contrast by up to 100x in a halfdark hole to enable a new regime of science discoveries. Our team has been developing this new technology at the NRC's Extreme Wavefront control for Exoplanet and Adaptive optics Research Topics (NEW EARTH) laboratory over the past several years. The GPI CAL2.0 update is funded (November 2020), and the system’s first light is expected late 2023.
The NEW EARTH Laboratory (NRC Extreme Wavefront control for Exoplanet Adaptive optics Research Topics at Herzberg) has recently been completed at NRC in Victoria. NEW EARTH is the first Canadian test-bed dedicated to high-contrast imaging. The bench optical design allows a wide range of applications that could require turbulent phase screens, segmented pupils, or custom coronagraphic masks. Super-polished off-axis parabolas are implemented to minimize optical aberrations, in addition to a 468-actuator ALPAO deformable mirror and a Shack Hartmann WFS. The laboratory’s immediate goal is to validate the Fast Atmospheric Self-coherent camera Technique (FAST). The first results of this technique obtained in the NEW EARTH laboratory with a Tilt-Gaussian-Vortex focal plane mask, a reflective Lyot stop and Coherent Differential Imaging are encouraging. Future work will be aimed at expanding this technique to broader wavebands in the context of extremely large telescopes and at visible bands for space-based observatories.
Time-of- ight depth imaging and transient imaging are two imaging modalities that have recently received a lot of interest. Despite much research, existing hardware systems are limited either in terms of temporal resolution or are prohibitively expensive. Arrays of Single Photon Avalanche Diodes (SPADs) are promising candidates to fill this gap by providing higher temporal resolution at an affordable cost. Unfortunately, state-of-the-art SPAD arrays are only available in relatively small resolutions and low fill-factor. Furthermore, the low fill-factor issue leads to more ill-posed problems when seeking to realize the super-resolution imaging with SPAD array. In this work, we target on hand-crafting the optical structure of SPAD array to enable the super-resolution design of SPAD array. We particularly investigate the scenario of optical coding for SPAD array, including the improvement of fill-factor of SPAD array by assembling microstructures and the direct light modulation using a diffractive optical element. A part of the design work has been applied in our recent advance, where here we show several applications in depth and transient imaging.
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