Open Access
26 May 2024 Implicit electric field conjugation through a single-mode fiber
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Abstract

Connecting a coronagraph instrument to a spectrograph via a single-mode optical fiber is a promising technique for characterizing the atmospheres of exoplanets with ground and space-based telescopes. However, due to the small separation and extreme flux ratio between planets and their host stars, instrument sensitivity will be limited by residual starlight leaking into the fiber. To minimize stellar leakage, we must control the electric field at the fiber input. Implicit electric field conjugation (iEFC) is a model-independent wavefront control (WFC) technique in contrast with classical EFC, which requires a detailed optical model of the system. We present here the concept of an iEFC-based WFC algorithm to improve stellar rejection through a single-mode fiber (SMF). As opposed to image-based iEFC, which relies on minimizing intensity in a dark hole region, our approach aims to minimize the amount of residual starlight coupling into an SMF. We present broadband simulation results demonstrating a normalized intensity 1010 for both fiber-based EFC and iEFC. We find that both control algorithms exhibit similar performance for the low wavefront error (WFE) case, however, iEFC outperforms EFC by 100x in the high WFE regime. Having no need for an optical model, this fiber-based approach offers a promising alternative to EFC for ground and space-based telescope missions, particularly in the presence of residual WFE.

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.
Joshua Liberman, Jorge Llop-Sayson, Arielle Bertrou-Cantou, Dimitri Mawet, Niyati Desai, Sebastiaan Y. Haffert, and A. J. Eldorado Riggs "Implicit electric field conjugation through a single-mode fiber," Journal of Astronomical Telescopes, Instruments, and Systems 10(2), 029002 (26 May 2024). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JATIS.10.2.029002
Received: 30 September 2023; Accepted: 8 May 2024; Published: 26 May 2024
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KEYWORDS
Single mode fibers

Electric fields

Coronagraphy

Equipment

Planets

Space telescopes

Telescopes

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