Presentation + Paper
10 July 2018 The evanescent wave coronagraph project: setup results and demonstrator preliminary design
Christophe Buisset, Thierry Lépine, Eric Thiébaut, Maud Langlois, Michel Tallon, Mary Angelie Alagao, Isabelle Tallon-Bosc, Yves Rabbia, Saran Poshyachinda, Boonrucksar Soonthornthum , Elsa Ducrot
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The objective of the Evanescent Wave Coronagraph (EvWaCo) project is to develop a new kind of simple and cost effective coronagraph, first for ground-based telescopes and then for space-based telescopes. The principle involves the tunneling effect to separate the star light from the companion light. The star light is directed transmitted toward a WaveFront Sensor (WFS) that measures the wavefront distortions in the immediate proximity of the occulting mask with minimum non-common path errors. The beam reflected by the mask propagates toward the Lyot stop and forms the images of the companion and of the star residuals on the camera.

The EvWaCo concept has been demonstrated and this instrument is achromatic over the I-band of the Johnson- Cousins photometric system in unpolarized light. We have measured over this photometric band an Inner Working Angle (IWA) equal to 6 λ/D and contrasts of a few 10-6 at distances greater than 10 Airy radii from the star Point Spread Function (PSF) center.

This paper describes the continuation of the project, from this setup of demonstration to the first prototype operating on the sky at horizon 2020. The objective is to show the capability of the full system to provide IWA and raw contrasts close to the state-of-art performance with the Thai National Telescope, by observing through an unobstructed elliptical pupil of major axis length equal to 1 m. The system will demonstrate over the full I-band an IWA close to 3 λ/D and raw contrasts equal to a few 10-4 at a distance equal to the IWA from the PSF.
Conference Presentation
© (2018) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Christophe Buisset, Thierry Lépine, Eric Thiébaut, Maud Langlois, Michel Tallon, Mary Angelie Alagao, Isabelle Tallon-Bosc, Yves Rabbia, Saran Poshyachinda, Boonrucksar Soonthornthum , and Elsa Ducrot "The evanescent wave coronagraph project: setup results and demonstrator preliminary design", Proc. SPIE 10706, Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation III, 107062P (10 July 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2311958
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CITATIONS
Cited by 1 scholarly publication.
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KEYWORDS
Coronagraphy

Adaptive optics

Stars

Point spread functions

Wavefronts

Prototyping

Wavefront distortions

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