Implicit electric field conjugation with a photonic lantern nuller

Le résumé fourni par la source

The photonic lantern nuller (PLN) is an instrument concept designed to characterize exoplanets within a single beam width from its host star. The PLN leverages the spatial symmetry of a mode-selective photonic lantern to create nulled ports, which cancel out on-axis starlight but allow off-axis exoplanet light to couple. The null depths are limited by wavefront aberrations in the system as well as by imperfections in the lantern. We show that the implicit electric field conjugation (iEFC) algorithm can be used to reduce the stellar coupling through the PLN by orders of magnitude while maintaining the majority of the off-axis light, leading to deeper null depths (∼10−4) and thus higher sensitivity to potential planet signals. We discuss a theory for the tradeoff we observed among the different ports, where iEFC improves the nulls of some ports at the expense of others, and show that targeting one port alone can lead to deeper starlight rejection through that port than when targeting all ports at once. We also observe different levels of stability depending on the port and discuss the implications of practically implementing this technique for scientific observations.

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