Demonstration of multi-star wavefront control using SCExAO

The science promised by high-contrast imaging missions will result in great leaps in our understanding of exoplanetary and the detection and spectral characterization of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone. However, none of these missions can image multi-star systems with current technology except when the leak and glare of the companion star(s) is negligible or small enough to be removed by post-processing. Therefore, many systems with multiple stars (or optical multiples) are often excluded from target lists of such missions. Our solution to binary star suppression is a wavefront control algorithm called Multi-Star Wavefront Control (MSWC). In general, any region of interest where we wish to detect planets contains a mix of speckles from both stars, which are mutually incoherent. When MSWC is used It is possible to null speckles from both stars if the region of interest is appropriately chosen, and non-redundant modes of the Deformable Mirror are used. Feasibility of MSWC was demonstrated in computer simulations and at the Ames Coronagraph Experiment Experiment laboratory. In this paper, we report the demonstration of MSWC using the Subaru Coronagraph Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) as part of our technology development effort. Our goal is to show that MSWC can achieve an order of magnitude better contrast on binary stars than conventional (i.e., single-star) techniques on binaries. Demonstrating this technique on SCExAO will validate MSWC on a real system (with a calibration source). Thus, proving that the technique can be applied on deployed instrumentation without major modifications.