Adaptive optics for very high-contrast imaging: numerical simulations

Abstract

Due to its capacity in retrieving the angular resolution of ground-based optical telescopestogether with their intrinsic sensitivity, adaptive optics (AO) is well known to be of fundamentalimportance for a wide range of astronomical applications. In the case of veryhigh-contrast imaging it is even more critical given the limitation due to the atmosphericresiduals. The ability of an AO system in "cleaning" the obtained point-spread functionbefore a coronagraphic stage is therefore of central importance - and so the robustnessof a given coronagraphic stage with respect to the post-AO atmospheric residuals.Within this framework, thepresent paper describes the physical ingredients that are necessary to be modelized whendesigning a detailed numerical simulation study of this kind, together with a typical numericaltool used in this context. An example involving a very high-order AO system is given, asimple implementation of different coronagraphic concepts is exposed, and an illustrativepreliminary result involving the high-order AO-correction stage coupled with the different coronagraphicdevices implemented is shown.