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At least 37 records · Page 2

The Separation and Hα Contrasts of Massive Accreting Planets in the Gaps of Transitional Disks: Predicted Hα Protoplanet Yields for Adaptive Optics Surveys

We present a massive accreting gap planet model that ensures large gaps in transitional disks are kept dust free by the scattering action of three coplanar quasi-circular planets in a 1:2:4 mean motion resonance (MMR). This model uses the constraint of the observed gap size, and the dust-free nature of the gap, to determine within ∼10% the possible orbits for three massive planets in an MMR. Calculated orbits are consistent with the observed orbits and Hα emission (the brightest line to observe these planets) for LkCa 15 b, PDS 70 b, and PDS 70 c within observational errors. Moreover, the model suggests that the scarcity of detected Hα planets is likely a selection effect of the current limitations of non-coronagraphic, low (<10%) Strehl, Hα imaging with adaptive optics (AO) systems used in past Hα surveys. We predict that as higher Strehl AO systems (with high-performance custom coronagraphs; like the 6.5 m Magellan Telescope MagAO-X system) are utilized at Hα, the number of detected gap planets will substantially increase by more than tenfold. For example, we show that >25 ± 5 new Hα “gap planets” are potentially discoverable by a survey of the best 19 transitional disks with MagAO-X. Detections of these accreting protoplanets will significantly improve our understanding of planet formation, planet growth and accretion, solar system architectures, and planet–disk interactions.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Development of X-ray Wavefront Sensing Techniques for Adaptive Optics Control at the Advanced Photon Source

The planning and construction of new and upgraded high-brightness X-ray synchrotron and free electron laser sources, such as the Advanced Photon Source upgrade project (APS-U), are driving numerous opportunities to advance X-ray science and technologies. At the same time, an increasing number of highly diverse beamline experiments demand wavefront-preserving adaptive X-ray optics with both high precision and flexibility. At the APS, significant effort has been devoted to developing next-generation adaptive and corrective optics combined with state-of-the-art at-wavelength wavefront sensing techniques and an intelligent feedback control system for the automation and self-alignment of beamline optical systems. This article reviews recent achievements in these areas at the APS. Further, these include the development of in-situ wavefront sensing, the application in active feedback control of ultra-precision deformable mirrors, and the exploration of non-invasive wavefront sensing techniques for adaptive optics and beamline diagnostics.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

System and method for adaptive optical tracking with selectable tracking modes

The present disclosure relates to an adaptive, free-space optical system. The system may have a controller and a digital micromirror (DMM) array responsive to the controller. The digital micromirror may include a plurality of independently controllable micromirror elements forming a receiver for receiving optical signals from an environmental scene. At least two of the plurality of independently controllable micromirror elements are steerable in different directions to receive optical signals emanating from two or more locations within the environmental scene. A beam steering subsystem forms a portion of the micromirror array and is in communication with the controller for receiving control signals from the controller. A detector is used to receive an incoming free space optical signal imaged by at least one of the micromirror elements.

Panas, Robert Matthew↗

System and method for compact, adaptive optical sensor for obtaining areal images

The present disclosure relates to an imaging system which may make use of an electronic controller, a digital micromirror array, an aperture control system and a detector to image a desired scene. The digital micromirror array has a plurality of micromirror elements responsive to control signals generated by the electronic controller for electronically aiming the micromirror elements in a desired direction to image the desired area, and for receiving and reflecting light emanating from the desired area. The aperture control system receives light reflected from the digital micromirror array and passes a predetermined subportion of the received light therethrough. The detector is responsive to the predetermined subportion of light.

Panas, Robert Matthew↗

Machine learning control of an elliptically bent hard x-ray mirror

This article showcases the high-resolution control of an elliptically bent hard X-ray mirror optics at the Advanced Photon Source. The mirror uses a compact laminar flexure bending mechanism to achieve elliptical shapes covering a large range of focal distances. An array of capacitive sensors are used as a surface profiler for in-situ monitoring of the mirror shape. Machine learning and control techniques were used to change the mirror shape and focus the incident X-ray at predefined focal planes. The mirror surface shape error can be controlled to be within 40 nm rms with high repeatability. This technique gives the capability to focus incident X-ray beam within a range of focal distances corresponding to shape deformation range of a mirror optics. This work would be beneficial for controlling similar adaptive optics for multiple adaptive optics systems.

adaptive optics↗

Fourier-based three-dimensional multistage transformer for aberration correction in multicellular specimens

High-resolution tissue imaging is often compromised by sample-induced optical aberrations that degrade resolution and contrast. Although wavefront sensor-based adaptive optics (AO) can measure these aberrations, such hardware solutions are typically complex, expensive to implement and slow when serially mapping spatially varying aberrations across large fields of view. Here we introduce AOViFT (adaptive optical vision Fourier transformer)—a machine learning-based aberration sensing framework built around a three-dimensional multistage vision transformer that operates on Fourier domain embeddings. AOViFT infers aberrations and restores diffraction-limited performance in puncta-labeled specimens with substantially reduced computational cost, training time and memory footprint compared to conventional architectures or real-space networks. We validated AOViFT on live gene-edited zebrafish embryos, demonstrating its ability to correct spatially varying aberrations using either a deformable mirror or postacquisition deconvolution. By eliminating the need for the guide star and wavefront sensing hardware and simplifying the experimental workflow, AOViFT lowers technical barriers for high-resolution volumetric microscopy across diverse biological samples.

Alshaabi, Thayer [Howard Hughes Medical Institute,↗

High-speed Focal Plane Wave Front Sensing with an Optical Chopper

Focal plane wave front sensing and control is a critical approach to reducing noncommon path errors between a conventional astronomical adaptive optics (AO) wave front sensor (WFS) detector and a science camera. However, in addition to mitigating noncommon path errors, recent focal plane wave front sensing techniques have been developed to operate at speeds fast enough to enable "multi-WFS" AO, where residual atmospheric errors are further corrected by a focal plane WFS. Although a number of such techniques have been recently developed for coronagraphic imaging, here we present one designed for noncoronagraphic imaging. Utilizing conventional AO system components, this concept additionally requires (1) a detector imaging the focal plane of the WFS light source and (2) a pupil plane optical chopper device that is the noncommon path to the first WFS and is synchronized to the focal plane imager readout. These minimal hardware requirements enable the temporal amplitude modulation to resolve the sine ambiguity of even wave-front modes for low, mid, and high wave front spatial frequencies. Similar capabilities have been demonstrated with classical phase diversity by defocusing the detector, but such techniques are incompatible with simultaneous science observations. This optical chopping technique, however, enables science imaging at up to 50% duty cycle. In conclusion, we present both simulations and laboratory validation of this concept on SEAL, the Santa Cruz Extreme AO Laboratory testbed.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

RGB wavefront sensor for turbulence mitigation

A compact adaptive optics system for long-range horizontal paths imaging that improves degraded images. The system uses a filter that corresponds to the three colors in a typical color detector element, one or more optic elements, a deformable mirror, and a detector. Focus errors, due to turbulence, in the image recorded by the detector element show up as image shifts in the three distinct color images. The shifts and statistics of these shifts between these simultaneous images are used to create control signals for the deformable mirror resulting in a compact adaptive optic system for horizontal paths without need for a point source located at the distance scene being imaged. Analysis of the relative pixel shifts in various regions of the image provides third order statistics revealing tip/tilt and additional Zernikes modes that are used to control a deformable mirror without the need for a guide star/point-source.

O'Neill, Mary Dominique↗

The Outburst of the Young Star Gaia19bey

We report photometry and spectroscopy of the outburst of the young stellar object Gaia19bey. We have established the outburst light curve with archival Gaia “G,” ATLAS “Orange,” Zwicky Transient Facility r-band, and Pan-STARRS “rizy”-filter photometry, showing an outburst of ~4 yr duration, longer than typical EX Lupi objects but shorter than FU Orionis objects. Its pre-outburst spectral energy distribution shows a flat far-infrared spectrum, confirming the early evolutionary state of Gaia19bey and its similarity to other deeply embedded young stars experiencing outbursts. A lower limit to the peak outburst luminosity is ~182 L{sub ⊙} at an assumed distance of 1.4 kpc, the minimum plausible distance. Infrared and optical spectroscopy near maximum light show an emission line spectrum, including H i lines, strong red Ca ii emission, other metal emission lines, infrared CO bandhead emission, and a strong infrared continuum. Toward the end of the outburst, the emission lines have all but disappeared and the spectrum has changed into an almost pure continuum spectrum. This indicates a cessation of magnetospheric accretion activity. The near-infrared colors have become redder as Gaia19bey has faded, indicating a cooling of the continuum component. Near the end of the outburst, the only remaining strong emission lines are forbidden shock-excited emission lines. Adaptive optics integral-field spectroscopy shows the H{sub 2} 1–0 S(1) emission with the morphology of an outflow cavity and the extended emission in the [Fe ii] line at 1644 nm with the morphology of an edge-on disk. However, we do not detect any large-scale jet from Gaia19bey.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Using the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm to reconstruct nonmodulated pyramid wavefront sensor measurements

Adaptive optics (AO) is a technique to improve the resolution of ground-based telescopes by correcting, in real-time, optical aberrations due to atmospheric turbulence and the telescope itself. With the rise of Giant Segmented Mirror Telescopes (GSMT), AO is needed more than ever to reach the full potential of these future observatories. One of the main performance drivers of an AO system is the wavefront sensing operation, consisting of measuring the shape of the above mentioned optical aberrations. Aims. The non-modulated pyramid wavefront sensor (nPWFS) is a wavefront sensor with high sensitivity, allowing the limits of AO systems to be pushed. The high sensitivity comes at the expense of its dynamic range, which makes it a highly non-linear sensor. We propose here a novel way to invert nPWFS signals by using the principle of reciprocity of light propagation and the Gerchberg-Saxton (GS) algorithm. We test the performance of this reconstructor in two steps: the technique is first implemented in simulations, where some of its basic properties are studied. Then, the GS reconstructor is tested on the Santa Cruz Extreme Adaptive optics Laboratory (SEAL) testbed located at the University of California Santa Cruz. This new way to invert the nPWFS measurements allows us to drastically increase the dynamic range of the reconstruction for the nPWFS, pushing the dynamics close to a modulated PWFS. The reconstructor is an iterative algorithm requiring heavy computational burden, which could be an issue for real-time purposes in its current implementation. However, this new reconstructor could still be helpful in the case of many wavefront control operations. In conclusion, this reconstruction technique has also been successfully tested on the Santa Cruz Extreme AO Laboratory (SEAL) bench where it is now used as the standard way to invert nPWFS signal.

47 OTHER INSTRUMENTATION↗

Trigonometric Parallaxes of Two T Dwarfs With Keck and ShaneAO Astrometry

We present trigonometric parallax and proper motion measurements for two T-type brown dwarfs. We derive our measurements from infrared laser guide star adaptive optics observations spanning five years from the ShaneAO/SHARCS and NIRC2/medium-cam instruments on the Shane and Keck telescopes, respectively. To improve our astrometric precision, we measure and apply a distortion correction to our fields for both instruments. We also transform the Keck and ShaneAO astrometric reference frames onto the ICRS using five-parameter parallax and proper motion solutions for background reference stars from Gaia DR2. Fitting for parallax and proper motion, we measure parallaxes of 73.5 ± 9.2 mas and 70.1 ± 6.7 mas for WISEJ19010703+47181688 (WISE1901) and WISEJ21543294+59421370 (WISE2154), respectively. We utilize Monte Carlo methods to estimate the error in our sparse field methods, taking into account overfitting and differential atmospheric refraction. Comparing to previous measurements in the literature, all of our parallax and proper motion values fall within 2σ of the published measurements, and 4 of 6 measurements are within 1σ. These data are among the first parallax measurements of these T dwarfs and serve as precise measurements for calibrating stellar formation models. These two objects are the first results of an ongoing survey of T dwarfs with Keck/NIRC2 and the Shane Adaptive Optics system at Lick Observatory.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗