arXiv subjects

Eric Thiébaut

Publications and source records attributed to Eric Thiébaut.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Pixel-Level Calibration for Space-Based High Precision Astrometry Using Young's Fringes

The detection of Earth-like exoplanets via astrometry necessitates centroiding precision at the 0.3 microarcsec level, thereby imposing stringent constraints on the focal plane geometry of space telescopes. The AGATE focal plane instrument, a proposed component of the NASA Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), aims to achieve this objective through the calibration of the intra-pixel response function of CMOS detectors to an accuracy of 50 micropixel (220 nm The present paper proposes a Young's fringes-based calibration method, derived from those employed by JPL and IPAG, for the purpose of mapping the pixel response barycenter offsets across the detector. Using a Pyxalis GIGAPYX-4600 CMOS sensor, we demonstrate via simulations and laboratory measurements that (1) a precision of 500 micropixel is achievable with 10,000 frames (current setup); (2) inter-pixel capacitance crosstalk and fringe hyperbolicity are dominating the errors at small and large scales, respectively; and, (3) an iterative inverse problem approach with a hyperbolic fringe model is proposed to overcome paraxial approximation limits for 1 Gpix focal planes. These results pave the way for on-board calibration of HWO's astrometric instrument, ensuring the sub-microarcsec precision required for exo-Earth detection.

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arXiv2024

Upgrading SPHERE with the second stage AO system SAXO+: frequency-based data-driven controller for adaptive optics

This study introduces a novel frequency-based data-driven controller for adaptive optics, using power spectral density for optimization while ensuring stability criteria. It addresses disturbance rejection, command amplitude constraints and system transfer functions through convex optimization to obtain an optimal control in an infinite input response filter form. Evaluated within the SAXO+ project, it demonstrates efficacy under diverse atmospheric conditions and operational scenarios. The proposed controller is tested in both standard and disentangled adaptive optics schemes, showcasing its adaptability and performance. Experimental validation is conducted using the COMPASS simulation tool, affirming the controller's promise for enhancing adaptive optics systems in real-world applications.

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arXiv2024

Shrinkage MMSE estimators of covariances beyond the zero-mean and stationary variance assumptions

We tackle covariance estimation in low-sample scenarios, employing a structured covariance matrix with shrinkage methods. These involve convexly combining a low-bias/high-variance empirical estimate with a biased regularization estimator, striking a bias-variance trade-off. Literature provides optimal settings of the regularization amount through risk minimization between the true covariance and its shrunk counterpart. Such estimators were derived for zero-mean statistics with i.i.d. diagonal regularization matrices accounting for the average sample variance solely. We extend these results to regularization matrices accounting for the sample variances both for centered and non-centered samples. In the latter case, the empirical estimate of the true mean is incorporated into our shrinkage estimators. Introducing confidence weights into the statistics also enhance estimator robustness against outliers. We compare our estimators to other shrinkage methods both on numerical simulations and on real data to solve a detection problem in astronomy.

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arXiv2022

IMAGE-OI: an OIFITS extension and its application in OImaging to compare image reconstruction algorithms

In interferometry, the quality of the reconstructed image depends on the algorithm used and its parameters, and users often need to compare the results of several algorithms to disentangle artifacts from actual features of the astrophysical object. Such comparisons can rapidly become cumbersome, as these software packages are very different. OImaging is a graphical interface intended to be a common frontend to image reconstruction software packages. With OImaging, the user can now perform multiple reconstructions within a single interface. From a given dataset, OImaging allows benchmarking of different image reconstruction algorithms and assessment of the reliability of the image reconstruction process. To that end, OImaging uses the IMAGE-OI OIFITS extension proposed to standardize communication with image reconstruction algorithms.

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arXiv2018

Why Chromatic Imaging Matters

During the last two decades, the first generation of beam combiners at the Very Large Telescope Interferometer has proved the importance of optical interferometry for high-angular resolution astrophysical studies in the near- and mid-infrared. With the advent of 4-beam combiners at the VLTI, the u-v coverage per pointing increases significantly, providing an opportunity to use reconstructed images as powerful scientific tools. Therefore, interferometric imaging is already a key feature of the new generation of VLTI instruments, as well as for other interferometric facilities like CHARA and JWST. It is thus imperative to account for the current image reconstruction capabilities and their expected evolutions in the coming years. Here, we present a general overview of the current situation of optical interferometric image reconstruction with a focus on new wavelength-dependent information, highlighting its main advantages and limitations. As an Appendix we include several cookbooks describing the usage and installation of several state-of-the art image reconstruction packages. To illustrate the current capabilities of the software available to the community, we recovered chromatic images, from simulated MATISSE data, using the MCMC software SQUEEZE. With these images, we aim at showing the importance of selecting good regularization functions and their impact on the reconstruction.

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arXiv2015

Development of an ELT XAO testbed using a Mach-Zehnder wavefront sensor: calibration of the deformable mirror

(abridged) Extreme adaptive optics (XAO) encounters severe difficulties to cope with the high speed (>1kHz), high accuracy and high order requirements for future extremely large telescopes. An innovative high order adaptive optics system using a self-referenced Mach-Zehnder wavefront sensor (MZWFS) allows counteracting these limitations. This sensor estimates very accurately the wavefront phase at small spatial scale by measuring intensity differences between two outputs, with a $λ/4$ path length difference between its two legs, but is limited in dynamic range due to phase ambiguity. During the past few years, such an XAO system has been studied by our team in the framework of 8-meter class telescopes. In this work, we report on our latest results with the XAO testbed recently installed in our lab, and dedicated to high contrast imaging with 30m-class telescopes (such as the E-ELT or the TMT). After reminding the principle of a MZWFS and describing the optical layout of our experiment, we will show the results of the assessment of the woofer-tweeter phase correctors, i.e., a Boston Micromachine continuous membrane deformable mirror (DM) and a Boulder Nonlinear Systems liquid crystal spatial light modulator (SLM). In particular, we will detail the calibration of the DM using Zygo interferometer metrology. Our method consists in the precise measurement of the membrane deformation while applying a constant deformation to 9 out of 140 actuators at the same time. By varying the poke voltage across the DM operating range, we propose a simple but efficient way of modeling the DM influence function using a Gaussian model. Finally, we show the DM flattening on the MZWFS allowing to compensate for low order aberrations.

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arXiv2015

Large Scale 3D Image Reconstruction in Optical Interferometry

Astronomical optical interferometers (OI) sample the Fourier transform of the intensity distribution of a source at the observation wavelength. Because of rapid atmospheric perturbations, the phases of the complex Fourier samples (visibilities) cannot be directly exploited , and instead linear relationships between the phases are used (phase closures and differential phases). Consequently, specific image reconstruction methods have been devised in the last few decades. Modern polychromatic OI instruments are now paving the way to multiwavelength imaging. This paper presents the derivation of a spatio-spectral ("3D") image reconstruction algorithm called PAINTER (Polychromatic opticAl INTErferometric Reconstruction software). The algorithm is able to solve large scale problems. It relies on an iterative process, which alternates estimation of polychromatic images and of complex visibilities. The complex visibilities are not only estimated from squared moduli and closure phases, but also from differential phases, which help to better constrain the polychromatic reconstruction. Simulations on synthetic data illustrate the efficiency of the algorithm.

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arXiv2012

The 2012 Interferometric Imaging Beauty Contest

We present the results of the fifth Interferometric Imaging Beauty Contest. The contest consists in blind imaging of test data sets derived from model sources and distributed in the OIFITS format. Two scenarios of imaging with CHARA/MIRC-6T were offered for reconstruction: imaging a T Tauri disc and imaging a spotted red supergiant. There were eight different teams competing this time: Monnier with the software package MACIM; Hofmann, Schertl and Weigelt with IRS; Thiébaut and Soulez with MiRA ; Young with BSMEM; Mary and Vannier with MIROIRS; Millour and Vannier with independent BSMEM and MiRA entries; Rengaswamy with an original method; and Elias with the radio-astronomy package CASA. The contest model images, the data delivered to the contestants and the rules are described as well as the results of the image reconstruction obtained by each method. These results are discussed as well as the strengths and limitations of each algorithm.

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arXiv2011

Image reconstruction in optical interferometry: Benchmarking the regularization

With the advent of infrared long-baseline interferometers with more than two telescopes, both the size and the completeness of interferometric data sets have significantly increased, allowing images based on models with no a priori assumptions to be reconstructed. Our main objective is to analyze the multiple parameters of the image reconstruction process with particular attention to the regularization term and the study of their behavior in different situations. The secondary goal is to derive practical rules for the users. Using the Multi-aperture image Reconstruction Algorithm (MiRA), we performed multiple systematic tests, analyzing 11 regularization terms commonly used. The tests are made on different astrophysical objects, different (u,v) plane coverages and several signal-to-noise ratios to determine the minimal configuration needed to reconstruct an image. We establish a methodology and we introduce the mean-square errors (MSE) to discuss the results. From the ~24000 simulations performed for the benchmarking of image reconstruction with MiRA, we are able to classify the different regularizations in the context of the observations. We find typical values of the regularization weight. A minimal (u,v) coverage is required to reconstruct an acceptable image, whereas no limits are found for the studied values of the signal-to-noise ratio. We also show that super-resolution can be achieved with increasing performance with the (u,v) coverage filling. Using image reconstruction with a sufficient (u,v) coverage is shown to be reliable. The choice of the main parameters of the reconstruction is tightly constrained. We recommend that efforts to develop interferometric infrastructures should first concentrate on the number of telescopes to combine, and secondly on improving the accuracy and sensitivity of the arrays.

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arXiv2009

Probing magnetic fields with multi-frequency polarized synchrotron emission

We investigate the problem of probing the local spatial structure of the magnetic field of the interstellar medium using multi-frequency polarized maps of the synchrotron emission at radio wavelengths. We focus in this paper on the three-dimensional reconstruction of the largest scales of the magnetic field, relying on the internal depolarization (due to differential Faraday rotation) of the emitting medium as a function of electromagnetic frequency. We argue that multi-band spectroscopy in the radio wavelengths, developed in the context of high-redshift extragalactic HI lines, can be a very useful probe of the 3D magnetic field structure of our Galaxy when combined with a Maximum A Posteriori reconstruction technique. When starting from a fair approximation of the magnetic field, we are able to recover the true one by using a linearized version of the corresponding inverse problem. The spectral analysis of this problem allows us to specify the best sampling strategy in electromagnetic frequency and predicts a spatially anisotropic distribution of posterior errors. The reconstruction method is illustrated for reference fields extracted from realistic magneto-hydrodynamical simulations.

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arXiv2007

A scene model of exosolar systems for use in planetary detection and characterisation simulations

Instrumental projects that will improve the direct optical finding and characterisation of exoplanets have advanced sufficiently to trigger organized investigation and development of corresponding signal processing algorithms. The first step is the availability of field-of-view (FOV) models. These can then be submitted to various instrumental models, which in turn produce simulated data, enabling the testing of processing algorithms. We aim to set the specifications of a physical model for typical FOVs of these instruments. The dynamic in resolution and flux between the various sources present in such a FOV imposes a multiscale, independent layer approach. From review of current literature and through extrapolations from currently available data and models, we derive the features of each source-type in the field of view likely to pass the instrumental filter at exo-Earth level. Stellar limb darkening is shown to cause bias in leakage calibration if unaccounted for. Occurrence of perturbing background stars or galaxies in the typical FOV is unlikely. We extract galactic interstellar medium background emissions for current target lists. Galactic background can be considered uniform over the FOV, and it should show no significant drift with parallax. Our model specifications have been embedded into a Java simulator, soon to be made open-source. We have also designed an associated FITS input/output format standard that we present here.

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arXiv2005

VITRUV - Science Cases

VITRUV is a second generation spectro-imager for the PRIMA enabled Very Large Telescope Interferometer. By combining simultaneously up to 8 telescopes VITRUV makes the VLTI up to 6 times more efficient. This operational gain allows two novel scientific methodologies: 1) massive surveys of sizes; 2) routine interferometric imaging. The science cases presented concentrate on the qualitatively new routine interferometric imaging methodology. The science cases are not exhaustive but complementary to the PRIMA reference mission. The focus is on: a) the close environment of young stars probing for the initial conditions of planet formation and disk evolution; b) the surfaces of stars tackling dynamos, activity, pulsation, mass-loss and evolution; c) revealing the origin of the extraordinary morphologies of Planetary Nebulae and related stars; d) studying the accretion-ejection structures of stellar black-holes (microquasars) in our galaxy; e) unveiling the different interacting components (torus, jets, BLRs) of Active Galactic Nuclei; and f) probing the environment of nearby supermassive black-holes and relativistic effects in the Galactic Center black-hole.

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arXiv2005

VITRUV - Imaging close environments of stars and galaxies with the VLTI at milli-arcsec resolution

The VITRUV project has the objective to deliver milli-arcsecond spectro-images of the environment of compact sources like young stars, active galaxies and evolved stars to the community. This instrument of the VLTI second generation based on the integrated optics technology is able to combine from 4 to 8 beams from the VLT telescopes. Working primarily in the near infrared, it will provide intermediate to high spectral resolutions and eventually polarization analysis. This paper summarizes the result from the concept study led within the Joint Research Activity advanced instruments of the OPTICON program.

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