Experimental Verification of a One-dimensional Diffraction-limit Coronagraph

Abstract

Abstract We performed an experimental verification of a coronagraph. As a result, we confirmed that, at the focal region where the planetary point spread function exists, the coronagraph system mitigates the raw contrast of a star-planet system by at least 1 × 10−5 even for the 1-λ/D star-planet separation. In addition, the verified coronagraph keeps the shapes of the off-axis point spread functions when the setup has the source angular separation of 1λ/D. The low-order wave front error and the non-zero extinction ratio of the linear polarizer may affect the currently confirmed contrast. The sharpness of the off-axis point spread function generated by the sub-λ/D separated sources is promising for the fiber-based observation of exoplanets. The coupling efficiency with a single mode fiber exceeds 50% when the angular separation is greater than 3–4×10−1 λ/D. For sub-λ/D separated sources, the peak positions (obtained with Gaussian fitting) of the output point spread functions are different from the angular positions of sources; the peak position moved from about 0.8λ/D to 1.0λ/D as the angular separation of the light source varies from 0.1λ/D to 1.0λ/D. The off-axis throughput including the fiber-coupling efficiency (with respect to no focal plane mask) is about 40% for 1-λ/D separated sources and 10% for 0.5-λ/D separated ones (excluding the factor of the ratio of pupil aperture width and Lyot stop width), where we assumed a linear-polarized-light injection. In addition, because this coronagraph can remove point sources on a line in the sky, it has another promising application for high-contrast imaging of exoplanets in binary systems.