Comparison of simulated and hardware data for the effect of varying DM dither standard deviations (${\sigma }_{\text{dither}}$ [pm]) on the mean contrast in the DZ. Solid lines are hardware data, and dashed lines are simulated data. For the red triangle hardware curve, the initial contrast was not sufficiently high to see the effect of the dither.

Second-order model of the mean dark-zone contrast with respect to the dither for the HiCAT simulator and hardware. The second-order fit produces different equations for the lab and sim data due to the contrast floor on the testbed (right panel). Data points for the simulated and hardware experiments include error bars to show the standard deviation of the contrast in the DZ region over the 50 images; note that the error bars increase with dither magnitude, which is expected. At smaller dithers, the hardware does not reliably produce high enough contrasts to capture the behavior.