D. L. McDavitt, J. Ge, S. Miller (University of Florida)
Results from the fabrication and testing of an extremely coherent single mode fiber optic array are presented. The device, consisting of a fiber bundle coupled to matching hexagonal lenslet arrays held at both ends, is used to negate the effects of residual stellar leakage (scattering) due to imperfections in optics. The fiber bundle is composed of 100 single mode fibers which are held in place by a 10 x 10 array of grooves micro-machined in silicon sections to a submicron accuracy. The instrument will be used to provide an additional ~3 orders of magnitude in image contrast to the 6-7 orders of magnitude star light subtraction using the visible nulling interferometer for TPF as well as rejecting scattered light for a conventional visible coronagraph. The arrangement has the advantage of providing a deep null while still preserving the spatial information from the telescope pupil. These results represent our preliminary work for creating a much larger and more precisely controlled ~1000 fiber array.
We acknowledge support from JPL.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: dlm@astro.ufl.edu
Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.