Implicit electric field conjugation with a photonic lantern nuller
Creators
-
1.
California Institute of Technology
-
2.
University of California, Los Angeles
-
3.
Jet Propulsion Lab
-
4.
University of Sydney
-
5.
University of Central Florida
-
6.
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
-
7.
University of California, Santa Cruz
Abstract
The photonic lantern nuller (PLN) is an instrument concept designed to characterize exoplanets within a single beam width from its host star. The PLN leverages the spatial symmetry of a mode-selective photonic lantern to create nulled ports, which cancel out on-axis starlight but allow off-axis exoplanet light to couple. The null depths are limited by wavefront aberrations in the system as well as by imperfections in the lantern. We show that the implicit electric field conjugation (iEFC) algorithm can be used to reduce the stellar coupling through the PLN by orders of magnitude while maintaining the majority of the off-axis light, leading to deeper null depths (∼10⁻⁴) and thus higher sensitivity to potential planet signals. We discuss a theory for the tradeoff we observed among the different ports, where iEFC improves the nulls of some ports at the expense of others, and show that targeting one port alone can lead to deeper starlight rejection through that port than when targeting all ports at once. We also observe different levels of stability depending on the port and discuss the implications of practically implementing this technique for scientific observations.
Copyright and License
© 2025 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).
Acknowledgement
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback and suggestions for improving this paper. Y.X. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (Grant No. 1122374). Additional effort has been supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant Nos. 2109231, 2109232, 2308360, and 2308361). This research was carried out in part at the California Institute of Technology and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). This research made use of hcipy,24 Astropy,25–27 NumPy,28 SciPy,29 and Matplotlib.30 An earlier version of this work was presented in the Proceedings of SPIE in Ref. 31.
Data Availability
The code, data, and simulations used in this work can be found at https://github.com/yinzi-xin/pln_iefc_jatis, or with the DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15115353.
Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2503.24292 (arXiv)
- Is supplemented by
- Dataset: 10.5281/zenodo.15115353 (DOI)
Funding
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
- 1122374
- National Science Foundation
- 2109231
- National Science Foundation
- 2109232
- National Science Foundation
- 2308360
- National Science Foundation
- 2308361
Dates
- Submitted
-
2024-09-23
- Accepted
-
2025-03-31
- Available
-
2025-05-11Published
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- Astronomy Department , Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA) , Physics Department
- Publication Status
- Published