Optimal Design of Shaped Pupil Lyot Coronagraph for China's Large Segmented Telescope

@misc{yang2026optimal,
  title = {{Optimal Design of Shaped Pupil Lyot Coronagraph for China's Large Segmented Telescope}},
  author = {Kaining Yang and He Sun and Bin B. Ren and Fabo Feng and Yiyun Wu and Jinxin Liu and Linbo Cao and Ruobing Dong and Feng Long and Wei Wang},
  howpublished = {arXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.19509},
  eprint = {2610.19509},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19509},
}

TY  - UNPB
TI  - Optimal Design of Shaped Pupil Lyot Coronagraph for China's Large Segmented Telescope
AU  - Kaining Yang
AU  - He Sun
AU  - Bin B. Ren
AU  - Fabo Feng
AU  - Yiyun Wu
AU  - Jinxin Liu
AU  - Linbo Cao
AU  - Ruobing Dong
AU  - Feng Long
AU  - Wei Wang
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/14
PB  - arXiv
DO  - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.19509
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19509
AB  - China's next-generation large telescopes, such as the Expandable Aperture Segmented Telescope (EAST) and the Large Optical/Infrared Telescope (LOT), are being planned as flagship facilities for high-angular-resolution astronomy, including the direct imaging and characterization of exoplanetary systems (e.g., exoplanets, circumstellar disks). However, their segmented, centrally obscured apertures present significant challenges for coronagraph design: diffraction from segmented gaps and spiders severely limit contrast, particularly at small inner working angles (IWAs). To address this, we investigate an optimal Shaped Pupil Lyot Coronagraph (SPLC) architecture tailored for these telescopes, which combines a binary shaped pupil apodizer, a focal-plane occulting mask, and a Lyot stop to suppress stellar glare and enhance contrast. We further augment the coronagraph design with a two-deformable-mirror (2-DM) adaptive optics (AO) system to correct atmospheric turbulence and residual aberrations. End-to-end simulations based on site parameters for Lenghu in Qinghai Province and assuming idealized extreme AO (ExAO) correction demonstrate that the optimized 2DM-SPLC designs can achieve raw contrasts of order 10^-6-10^-7 in the V, H, and K bands, providing an upper-bound estimate of the system performance. The simulated performance highlights the advantages of the SPLC in mitigating diffraction from segmented and centrally obscured pupils while maintaining a small IWA and practical throughput, indicating that the 2DM-SPLC is a promising coronagraphic architecture for high-contrast exoplanet imaging on China's future large segmented telescopes.
ER  -