SPIE Summer 2024 Conference Proceedings Wrap up

This past summer team members presented research at both the Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation Conference in Yokohama and Optics+Photonics in San Diego. Continuing a blog tradition from 2023. A partial summary of the conference proceedings, and arXiv links to read the preprints free of publication charges, follows:

1. in Van Gorkom, et al. (2024, June 27).The space coronagraph optical bench (SCoOB): 4. vacuum performance of a high contrast imaging testbed. arXiv.2406.18885 we discussed recent progress demonstrating <1e-8 contrast with a vector vortex coronagraph our vacuum chamber.
2. in Jenkins, et al. (2024, June 27).Black silicon BRDF and polarization for coronagraphic pupil masks. arXiv.2406.19028 we developed a rudimentary statistical model of black silicon topography and simulated incident light upon it using the finite-difference time-domain method. We hope to improve this model to explore how the metamaterial scatters light in the context of enabling the direct imaging of exo-earths with black silicon shaped pupils.
3. in Kang, et al. (2024, Aug 21sc).Focus diverse phase retrieval test results on broadband continuous wavefront sensing in space telescope applications. arXiv.2409.10500 we discussed recent progress on phase retrieval testbed using broadband light source with various bandpass filters.
4. in Blomquist, et al. (2024, Aug 21sc). Alignment of three mirror anastigmat telescopes using a multilayered stochastic parallel gradient descent algorithm. arXiv.2409.04640 this paper presents a method of early-stage alignment using a stochastic parallel-gradientdescent (SPGD) algorithm which performs random perturbations to the optics of a three mirror anastigmat telescope design.