Dr Guyon has been developing and validating in the laboratory innovative techniques for detecting and characterizing Extrasolar planets. Dr Guyon's research includes coronagraphy, wavefront sensing techniques for Adaptive Optics, and astrometry. Dr Guyon developped the Phase-Induced Amplitude Apodization (PIAA) coronagraph, a highly efficient optical device to mask light from a star while preserving light from planets around it.
Dr Guyon is currently leading the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) group at the Subaru Telescope to use these new techniques on the Subaru telescope for exoplanet detection and characterization. Dr Guyon also works for the University of Arizona, where he is developing high contrast imaging techniques for current and future ground and space-based telescopes.
Dr Guyon was awarded the 2006 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by Office of the President of the United States, and the 2012 MacArthur fellowship.
Dr Guyon is currently leading the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) group at the Subaru Telescope to use these new techniques on the Subaru telescope for exoplanet detection and characterization. Dr Guyon also works for the University of Arizona, where he is developing high contrast imaging techniques for current and future ground and space-based telescopes.
Dr Guyon was awarded the 2006 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by Office of the President of the United States, and the 2012 MacArthur fellowship.
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The Magellan Extreme Adaptive Optics (MagAO-X) Instrument is an extreme AO system coming online at the end of 2019 that will be operating within the visible and near-IR. With state-of-the-art wavefront sensing and coronagraphy, MagAO-X will be optimized for high-contrast direct exoplanet imaging at challenging visible wavelengths, particularly
SCExAO, an instrument with a dual purpose: perform cutting-edge science and develop new technologies
Initially proposed as an instrument covering also the K-band, the current design foresees a camera working from Y to H bands, exploiting in this way the synergy with other LBT instruments such as LBTI, which is actually covering wavelengths greater than L' band, and it will be soon upgraded to work also in K band. SHARK-NIR has been undergoing the conceptual design review at the end of 2015 and it has been approved to proceed to the final design phase, receiving the green light for successive construction and installation at LBT.
The current design is significantly more flexible than the previous one, having an additional intermediate pupil plane that will allow the usage of coronagraphic techniques very efficient in term of contrast and vicinity to the star, increasing the instrument coronagraphic performance. The latter is necessary to properly exploit the search of giant exo-planets, which is the main science case and the driver for the technical choices of SHARK-NIR. We also emphasize that the LBT AO SOUL upgrade will further improve the AO performance, making possible to extend the exo-planet search to target fainter than normally achieved by other 8-m class telescopes, and opening in this way to other very interesting scientific scenarios, such as the characterization of AGN and Quasars (normally too faint to be observed) and increasing considerably the sample of disks and jets to be studied.
Finally, we emphasize that SHARK-NIR will offer XAO direct imaging capability on a FoV of about 15"x15", and a simple coronagraphic spectroscopic mode offering spectral resolution ranging from few hundreds to few thousands. This article presents the current instrument design, together with the milestones for its installation at LBT.
Different approaches are being implemented to take care of these issues. The PID control of the image rotator has been tuned to reduce their high-frequency contribution. We are working with the telescope team to tune the motor drives and reduce the impact of the elevation encoder. A Linear Quadratic Gaussian controller (LQG, or Kalman filter) is also being implemented inside SCExAO to control these vibrations. These solutions will not only improve significantly SCExAOs performance, but will also help all the other instruments on the Subaru Telescope, especially the ones behind AO188. Ultimately, this study will also help the development of the TMT, as these two telescopes share very similar drives.
The PIAACMC architecture can be designed for segmented and obscured apertures, so it is particularly well suited for ground-based observing with the next generation of large telescopes. There will be unique scientific opportunities for directly observing Earth-like planets around nearby low-mass stars. We will discuss design strategies for adapting PIAACMC for the next generation of large ground-based telescopes, and present progress on the development of the focal plane mask technology. We also present simulations of wave-front control with PIAACMC, and suggest directions to apply the coronagraph architecture to future telescopes.
Previously, we have reported experimental results on the first milestone, the demonstration of EXCEDE contrast in monochromatic light in air and more recently in vacuum. In this paper, we report on the procedure and the experimental results obtained for our second milestone demonstration of the EXCEDE starlight suppression system carried in a vacuum chamber at the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center. This includes high contrast performance demonstrations at 1.2 λD, which includes a lab demonstration of 1x10-5 median contrast between 1.2 and 2.0 λD simultaneously with 3x10-7 median contrast between 2 and 11 λD in 10% bandwidth polychromatic light centered at 650 nm for a single-sided dark zone. The results are stable and repeatable as demonstrated by three measurement runs with DM settings set from scratch and maintained on the best 90% out of the 1000 collected frames per run. We compare reduced experimental data with simulation results from modeling experimental limits.
VAMPIRES: probing the innermost regions of protoplanetary systems with polarimetric aperture-masking
Recent advances in coronagraph technologies for exoplanet imaging have achieved contrasts close to 1e-10 at 4 λ/D and 1e-9 at 2 λ/D in monochromatic light. A remaining technological challenge is to achieve high contrast in broadband light; a challenge that is largely limited by chromaticity of the focal plane mask. The size of a star image scales linearly with wavelength. Focal plane masks are typically the same size at all wavelengths, and must be sized for the longest wavelength in the observational band to avoid starlight leakage. However, this oversized mask blocks useful discovery space from the shorter wavelengths.
We present here the design, development, and testing of an achromatic focal plane mask based on the concept of optical filtering by a diffractive optical element (DOE). The mask consists of an array of DOE cells, the combination of which functions as a wavelength filter with any desired amplitude and phase transmission. The effective size of the mask scales nearly linearly with wavelength, and allows significant improvement in the inner working angle of the coronagraph at shorter wavelengths. The design is applicable to almost any coronagraph configuration, and enables operation in a wider band of wavelengths than would otherwise be possible. We include initial results from a laboratory demonstration of the mask with the Phase Induced Amplitude Apodization (PIAA) coronagraph.