Polarization aberration modeling of internal occulters for coronagraphs
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| _version_ | 1866909754870202368 |
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| author | Jenkins, Emory L. Riggs, A J Eldorado Douglas, Ewan S. Anche, Ramya M. McKeithen, Dylan M. Shaklan, Stuart B. |
| author_facet | Jenkins, Emory L. Riggs, A J Eldorado Douglas, Ewan S. Anche, Ramya M. McKeithen, Dylan M. Shaklan, Stuart B. |
| contents | The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is a flagship mission concept proposing to characterize earth-like exoplanets at high contrast with a coronagraph instrument. The most in-depth, validated contrast error budgets made to date have been at the $10^{-9}$ planet-to-star contrast levels for the Roman Space Telescope. To obtain the raw contrast levels of $\leq 10^{-10}$ contrast needed for HWO, more modeling is needed of the vector diffraction effects within a coronagraph instrument. Several coronagraph architectures are based on the Lyot coronagraph, which utilizes a small occulting spot to block most of the on-axis starlight at a focal plane. In this paper, we present a study of the polarization aberrations generated by internal occulting spots. First, we use finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) modeling to produce the complex transmission of the occulter in each polarization state, and then we separately run those through a closed-loop wavefront control model in FALCO\cite{rigss2018falco} to determine the degradation in achievable contrast. We perform sweeps of such parameters as spot diameter, spot thickness, and angle of incidence to inform the HWO instrument design. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_19397 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Polarization aberration modeling of internal occulters for coronagraphs Jenkins, Emory L. Riggs, A J Eldorado Douglas, Ewan S. Anche, Ramya M. McKeithen, Dylan M. Shaklan, Stuart B. Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is a flagship mission concept proposing to characterize earth-like exoplanets at high contrast with a coronagraph instrument. The most in-depth, validated contrast error budgets made to date have been at the $10^{-9}$ planet-to-star contrast levels for the Roman Space Telescope. To obtain the raw contrast levels of $\leq 10^{-10}$ contrast needed for HWO, more modeling is needed of the vector diffraction effects within a coronagraph instrument. Several coronagraph architectures are based on the Lyot coronagraph, which utilizes a small occulting spot to block most of the on-axis starlight at a focal plane. In this paper, we present a study of the polarization aberrations generated by internal occulting spots. First, we use finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) modeling to produce the complex transmission of the occulter in each polarization state, and then we separately run those through a closed-loop wavefront control model in FALCO\cite{rigss2018falco} to determine the degradation in achievable contrast. We perform sweeps of such parameters as spot diameter, spot thickness, and angle of incidence to inform the HWO instrument design. |
| title | Polarization aberration modeling of internal occulters for coronagraphs |
| topic | Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19397 |