Results for “coronagraphs”

DOE OSTI2025

Dispersion Leverage Coronagraph: a nulling coronagraph for use on primary objective grating telescopes

Here, we present the Dispersion Leverage Coronagraph (DLC), a variation of the Achromatic Interfero Coronagraph (AIC) that is designed for optical systems featuring large, dispersive primary objective gratings. DLC was originally designed for the Diffractive Interfero Coronagraph Exoplanet Resolver (DICER), a notional 20 m class infrared space telescope utilizing the enhanced one-dimensional angular resolution of large diffraction gratings to discover and characterize near-Earth exoplanets. Here we develop the theoretical foundation for DLC, and apply it to DICER as an example use case. We derive important properties of the DLC system, including focal plane transmission maps, stellar leakage, residual optical path difference tolerance, and pointing error/jitter considerations. Ultimately, we found that DLC effectively nulls an on-axis target across the entire spectrum in the focal plane, allowing for 2D/λ diffraction-limited imaging. It requires asymmetrical fine-guidance tolerances on pointing error/jitter. We work through a benchmark DICER design, explaining the need for a second disperser to reduce background from Zodiacal light, and showing that it could plausibly find and characterize ∼4 nearby, habitable exoplanets around Sun-like stars in a 7-year mission; about 30% of the habitable exoplanets within 8 pc were found in our simulation. The DLC may be useful for any application requiring extremely high-resolution, close companion spectroscopy.

AIC↗

DOE OSTI2023

The brighter-fatter effect in the JWST MIRI Si:As IBC detectors: I. Observations, impact on science, and modeling

Context.The Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) on board theJames WebbSpace Telescope (JWST) uses three Si:As impurity band conduction (IBC) detector arrays. The output voltage level of each MIRI detector pixel is digitally recorded by sampling up the ramp. For uniform or low-contrast illumination, the pixel ramps become nonlinear in a predictable way, but in areas of high contrast, the nonlinearity curve becomes much more complex. The origin of the effect is poorly understood and currently not calibrated out of the data. Aims.We provide observational evidence of the brighter-fatter effect (BFE) in MIRI conventional and high-contrast coronagraphic imaging, low-resolution spectroscopy, and medium-resolution spectroscopy data, and we investigate the physical mechanism that gives rise to the effect on the MIRI detector pixel raw voltage integration ramps. Methods.We used public data from the JWST/MIRI commissioning and Cycle 1 phase. We also developed a numerical electrostatic model of the MIRI detectors using a modified version of the publicPoisson_CCDcode. Results.We find that the physical mechanism behind the BFE manifesting in MIRI data is fundamentally different to that of charge-coupled devices and photodiode arrays such as the Hawaii-XRG near-infrared detectors used by the NIRISS, NIRCam, and NIRSpec instruments on board JWST. Observationally, the BFE makes the JWST MIRI data yield 10–25% larger point sources and spectral line profiles as a function of the relative level of de-biasing of neighboring detector pixels. This broadening impacts the MIRI absolute flux calibration, time-series observations of faint companions, and point spread function modeling and subtraction. We also find that the intra-pixel 2D profile of the shrinking Si:As IBC detector depletion region directly impacts the accuracy of the pixel ramp nonlinearity calibration model.

Astronomy & Astrophysics↗