High-contrast Imaging Design and Numerical Simulation of Exoplanets Detection in Full-working Area

The direct imaging on Earth-like exoplanets faces great challenges. The faint planet light is the reflective light through the atmosphere of the planet. Thus, the light intensity contrast between the planet and its host star is 10^-10 in the visible wavelength, causing the planet light contaminated by the stronger stellar light. Therefore, it is critical to suppress the strong light from the host star in order to detect the Earth-like exoplanets. In this paper, we propose the apodized pupil amplitude modulation and phase correction technique to achieve an extreme high contrast. We then provide a numerical simulation to demonstrate the feasibility and potential performance. An iterative Stochastic Parallel Gradient Descent (SPGD) algorithm is applied in the numerical simulation to optimize the target imaging contrast by evaluating the point spread function. Finally, it has demonstrated a contrast of 10^-10 in a whole 360-degree working area. The research demonstrates that the proposed approaches are promotive for the future Earth-like direct imaging detection in the space.