Focal plane wavefront sensing and control for ground-based imaging

We evaluate the performance of existing wavefront sensing and control techniques, including speckle nulling and electric field conjugation, and discuss their applicability to high-contrast imaging spectrographs such as the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI). These techniques can be highly useful in correcting system phase errors, and can potentially improve instrument operating efficiency by working in conjunction with the dedicated adaptive optics (AO) wavefront sensor. We discuss the specifics of our implementation of speckle suppression for GPI and present lab demonstrations with average contrast improvements from 5.7x10-6 to 1.03x10-6.

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