title: Speckle level suppression using an unbalanced nulling interferometer in a high-contrast imaging system.
abstract: High-contrast imaging systems with a stellar halo suppression level of 10(-10) are required for direct detection of Earth-like extra-solar planets. We investigated a novel high-contrast imaging system with an unbalanced nulling interferometer (UNI) followed by phase and amplitude correction (PAC), which not only can reduce starlight but also can suppress the speckle level caused by wavefront aberrations. We successfully demonstrated that wavefront aberrations were sufficiently magnified by the UNI and the magnified aberrations were effectively corrected in amplitude and phase with two deformable mirrors. We confirmed that the suppression level of the speckle pattern with the proposed optics was beyond the limit of the adaptive optics performance.
authors: Graduate School of Engineering, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, 2-24-16 Naka-cho, Koganei, Tokyo 184-8588, Japan. 50008834204@st.tuat.ac.jp
authors: Kaito
authors: K
authors: Yokochi
authors: Naoshi
authors: N
authors: Murakami
authors: Jun
authors: J
authors: Nishikawa
authors: Lyu
authors: L
authors: Abe
authors: Motohide
authors: M
authors: Tamura
authors: Alexander V
authors: AV
authors: Tavrov
authors: Mistuo
authors: M
authors: Takeda
authors: Takashi
authors: T
authors: Kurokawa