Laboratory test of a polarimetry imaging subtraction system for the high-contrast imaging

Jiangpei Dou; Deqing Ren; Yongtian Zhu; Xi Zhang; Rong Li

doi:10.1117/12.924245

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24 September 2012 Laboratory test of a polarimetry imaging subtraction system for the high-contrast imaging

Jiangpei Dou, Deqing Ren, Yongtian Zhu, Xi Zhang, Rong Li

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Proceedings Volume 8446, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy IV; 84468D (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.924245
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2012, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Abstract

We propose a polarimetry imaging subtraction test system that can be used for the direct imaging of the reflected light from exoplanets. Such a system will be able to remove the speckle noise scattered by the wave-front error and thus can enhance the high-contrast imaging. In this system, we use a Wollaston Prism (WP) to divide the incoming light into two simultaneous images with perpendicular linear polarizations. One of the images is used as the reference image. Then both the phase and geometric distortion corrections have been performed on the other image. The corrected image is subtracted with the reference image to remove the speckles. The whole procedure is based on an optimization algorithm and the target function is to minimize the residual speckles after subtraction. For demonstration purpose, here we only use a circular pupil in the test without integrating of our apodized-pupil coronagraph. It is shown that best result can be gained by inducing both phase and distortion corrections. Finally, it has reached an extra contrast gain of 50-times improvement in average, which is promising to be used for the direct imaging of exoplanets.

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Jiangpei Dou, Deqing Ren, Yongtian Zhu, Xi Zhang, and Rong Li "Laboratory test of a polarimetry imaging subtraction system for the high-contrast imaging", Proc. SPIE 8446, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy IV, 84468D (24 September 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.924245

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