Polarization aberration analysis for the PICTURE-C exoplanetary coronagraph

Abstract. The Planetary Imaging Concept Testbed Using a Recoverable Experiment - Coronagraph (PICTURE-C) mission will directly image debris disks and exozodiacal dust around nearby stars from a high-altitude balloon using a vector vortex coronagraph. One of the many starlight leakage sources that can degrade the performance of the coronagraph is polarization aberration induced by the reflective optical coatings. A polarization ray trace of the PICTURE-C telescope and coronagraph is combined with a physical optics wavefront propagation simulation to quantify the expected amount of coronagraph leakage due to polarization aberration. The simulations show the leakage is below the budgeted contrast of 1  ×  10  −  8.

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