Universiteit Leiden

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Dissertation

It's just a phase: High-contrast imaging with patterned liquid-crystal phase plates to facilitate characterization of exoplanets

This thesis aims to demonstrate how the achromatic nature and design flexibility of liquid-crystal optics can be used to improve high-contrast imaging instruments to facilitate detailed exoplanet characterization.

Author
Doelman, D.S.
Date
22 June 2021
Links
Thesis in Leiden Repository

This thesis aims to demonstrate how the achromatic nature and design flexibility of liquid-crystal optics can be used to improve high-contrast imaging instruments to facilitate detailed exoplanet characterization.Chapter 2 discusses the design, performance, and future development of the liquid-crystal vector-apodizing phase plate (vAPP) coronagraph, five of which have been installed in different instruments on current generation telescopes since 2016. In chapter 3 we use the achromatic nature of the vAPP in combination with the LBT/ALES integral field spectrograph to obtain the first ever thermal infrared spectrum of the inner three HR 8799 planets. In Chapter 4 and 8 we show that by combining multiple grating patterns to reduce the influence of polarization leakage, we can improve the performance of liquid-crystal coronagraphs. In Chapter 5 and 6 we enhance sparse aperture masking, capable of detecting companions beyond the diffraction limit, by using liquid-crystal phase masks to enable low-resolution spectroscopy and improve throughput. In Chapter 7 we demonstrate that a liquid-crystal Zernike wavefront sensor can accurately and efficiently measure phase and amplitude aberrations simultaneously, facilitating extreme contrasts. Together, the concepts presented in this thesis can be used to improve high-contrast imaging instruments of both ground-based and space-based observatories.

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