Coronagraphic wavefront sensing with COFFEE: high spatial-frequency diversity and other news

The final performance of current and future instruments dedicated to exoplanet detection and characterization is limited by intensity residuals in the scientific image plane, which originate in uncorrected optical aberrations. In order to reach very high contrasts, these aberrations needs to be compensated for. We have proposed a focalplane wave-font sensor called COFFEE (for COronagraphic Focal-plane wave-Front Estimation for Exoplanet detection), which consists in an extension of conventional phase diversity to a coronagraphic system. In this communication, we study the extension of COFFEE to the joint estimation of the phase and the amplitude in the context of space-based coronagraphic instruments: we optimize the diversity phase in order to minimize the reconstruction error; we also propose and optimize a novel low-amplitude high-frequency diversity that should allow the phase-diverse images to still be used for science. Lastly, we perform a first experimental validation of COFFEE in the very high, space-like contrast conditions of the THD bench and show that COFFEE is able to distinguish between phase and amplitude aberrations.