SHAPED PUPIL DESIGN FOR THE GEMINI PLANET IMAGER

The Gemini Planet Imager is an instrument designed for the Gemini South Telescope to image young Jupiter-mass planets in the infrared. To achieve the high contrast needed for this, it employs an apodized pupil Lyot coronagraph (APLC) to remove most of the starlight. Current designs use a partially transmitting apodizer in the pupil; we examine the use of binary apodizations in the form of star-shaped pupils and present a design that could achieve comparable performance, along with a series of design guidelines for creating shaped pupil versions of APLCs in other systems.

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