The Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL): Design and First Light

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2109.03318
• Publication Date: 2021-01-01
• Authors: Rebecca Jensen-Clem; Daren Dillon; Benjamin L. Gerard; Maaike van Kooten; J. Fowler; Renate Kupke; Sylvain Cetre; Dominic Sanchez; Philip M. Hinz; Cesar Laguna; David Doelman; Frans Snik
• Keywords: Deformable Mirror; Coronagraph; Wavefront sensor; Piston (optics); First light

The Santa Cruz Extreme AO Lab (SEAL) is a new visible-wavelength testbed designed to advance the state of art in wavefront control for high contrast imaging on large, segmented, ground-based telescopes. SEAL provides multiple options simulating atmospheric turbulence, including rotating phase plates and custom Meadowlark spatial light modulator that delivers offsets up 6pi at 635nm. A 37-segment IrisAO deformable mirror (DM) simulates W. M. Keck Observatory segmented primary mirror. adaptive optics system consists woofer/tweeter (a 97-actuator ALPAO DM 1024-actuator Boston Micromachines MEMs DM, respectively), four sensor arms: 1) high-speed Shack-Hartmann WFS, 2) reflective pyramid as prototype ShaneAO Lick Observatory, 3) vector-Zernike 4) Fast Atmospheric Self Coherent Camera Technique (FAST) demonstration arm, consisting focal plane mask sCMOS detector. Finally, science arms preliminarily include classical Lyot-style coronagraph well FAST (which doubles WFS camera). SEAL's real time based Compute Control Adaptive (CACAO) package, support efficient transfer software between II system. In this paper, we present an overview design first performance SEAL.