High-contrast coronagraphs have been developed to detect and characterize exo-planets with contrasts of 10-8~10-10. One method used for coronagraphs is the vector vortex phase mask, and a 6th-order one is required to sufficiently suppress the light from stars with finite apparent diameters using future large telescopes at the ground and in space. We manufactured 12- and 24-segmented sixth-order vector vortex phase masks with photonic crystal waveplates, and their fast axis orientations are 90 degrees and 45 degrees in adjacent regions, respectively. A three-layer structure was designed to cover a broad band of 600-1000nm. The design contrast for the phase mask alone is 8e-6, and we expect to achieve the final contrast by polarization filtering. We found that the retardation of the phase mask was almost coincident to the design curve. As for the 24-segment phase mask, a shaped pupil was designed as a combined element to exhibit the performance of the phase mask in the pupil shape of the TMT, which has the obstructions of the secondary mirror, the spiders, and the segment boundaries. The shaped pupil design has a transmittance of about 70% and a contrast of 10-7 within the outer working angle of 10 lambda/D. A shaped pupil was manufactured by chromium etching on a quartz substrate, and we observed the reduction of the diffracted light within 8 lambda/D.
Various types of high-contrast imaging instruments have been proposed and developed for direct detection of exoplanets by suppressing nearby stellar light. Stellar speckles due to wavefront aberration can be suppressed by the appropriate wavefront control, called the dark hole control. However, the speckles, which fluctuate faster than the dark hole control due to atmospheric turbulence in ground-based telescopes or instrument deformation caused by temperature changes in space telescopes, cannot be suppressed by the control and remain in focal plane images. The Coherent Differential Imaging on Speckle Area Nulling (CDI-SAN) method was proposed to overcome such fast fluctuating speckles and detect exoplanetary light. We constructed an optical setup in a laboratory to demonstrate the CDI-SAN method. With the dark hole control and the CDI-SAN method, we achieved 10−8 level of contrasts.
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