Laboratory demonstration of low order wavefront control using light reflected off the vortex coronagraph

Abstract

The Astro2020 Decadal Survey identified exoplanet imaging as a high priority for the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), which must image and characterize exo-Earths at contrasts of $1\times10^{-10}$. The vector vortex coronagraph (VVC) is a leading architecture for this task owing to its small inner working angle and high throughput. Using light reflected from the VVC for wavefront sensing and control provides a potential path to improving robustness to residual wavefront errors and minimizing contrast degradation. Here we present the first laboratory demonstration of a low order wavefront sensing and control (LOWFS) tip-tilt loop operating on light reflected from a VVC, carried out on the High Contrast and Spectroscopy Testbed (HCST) at Caltech's Exoplanet Technology Laboratory. The demonstration is enabled by HCST's upgrade to CATKit2, a service-oriented framework in which we implement phase retrieval, electric field conjugation (EFC), and the LOWFS loop as concurrent routines. Our phase retrieval reduces the science camera wavefront error from 71.6 to 7.9 nm RMS, a $>$9$\times$ improvement. Over a 12 hour open loop run, we find that PSF drift is strongly correlated with bench temperature ($r>0.88$). Closing the tip-tilt loop suppresses drift below 1 Hz by more than two orders of magnitude and holds pointing to $<0.005~\lambda/D$. Run concurrently with EFC, the closed loop maintains a dark hole contrast of $\sim$5$\times10^{-8}$ over one hour, whereas in open loop a drift of $\sim$0.2--0.4 $\lambda/D$ degrades contrast by more than an order of magnitude. These results establish reflected light sensing off a VVC as a viable foundation for future wavefront control architectures in high contrast coronagraphy.