Richard Clare

Coronagraph designs that use photonic integrated circuits have the highest theoretical throughput for off-axis signals, and therefore the highest potential exoplanet yield for future high-contrast direct imaging campaigns. Using the rejected starlight, the photonic integrated circuit may also provide simultaneous wavefront sensing, allowing for the correction of non-common-path aberrations.

The bi-orthogonal edge wavefront sensor (WFS) is, to our knowledge, a new wavefront sensor based on the Foucault knife-edge test. In this paper, we show by calculating sensitivity with the spatial frequency of Fourier modes that the bi-orthogonal edge WFS has higher photon and read noise sensitivity than the pyramid, roof, 3-sided, and cone WFS for both low-order (gradient) and high-order (Hilbert) modes.

The cone wavefront sensor consists of a cone (or axicon) placed at the focal plane of the imaging system, from which an annular intensity image is formed. Typically, the wavefront phase is estimated using inversion of an interaction matrix relating the intensity image to different aberration modes. In this paper, we show that the intensity image for the cone wavefront sensor is related to the radon transform of the wavefront phase.