Context. The next generation of exoplanet hunters will be targeting hot Jupiter-like exoplanets orbiting around nearby stars through direct imaging. The high contrast needed for such planet finders requires optical surfaces free of high spatial frequency ripples that might remain in the post-coronagraphic image as quasi-static speckles. Aims. We report results on the manufacturing of three supersmooth aspherical mirrors for the ESO/VLT-SPHERE instrument. The excellent optical quality obtained will allow the future planet hunter to increase the level of achievable contrast by a strong reduction of the noise level and residual quasi-static speckles on the image plane. Methods. The stress polishing method used on these mirrors is well suited to superpolishing aspheric components for astronomy. The main advantage of this technique is the very high optical quality obtained either on the form errors or on the high spatial frequency errors. Furthermore, the roughness can be decreased to a few angstroms, thanks to the classical polishing with a large pitch tool. Results. Interferograms obtained during polishing and in the final stage show the supersmooth quality of each mirror. Errors in the high spatial frequency range are lower than 4 nm rms WF, thereby avoiding the degradation of the post-coronagraphic image. A comparison of the power spectral density (PSD) obtained by stress polishing and the PSD of the VLT-UT3 primary mirror demonstrates that the contrast capabilities will not be limited by the aspherical mirrors.

By using x-ray diffraction and optical waveguide characterization, it has been shown that proton-exchanged layers on Z-cut LiNbO(3) can have as many as seven different crystallographic phases that are stable at room temperature. This study allows us to establish some correlation between fabrication parameters and the crystalline structure, the index profiles, and the propagation losses of waveguides prepared by this process.

The secondary mirror unit of the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) is supported by six 50-cm wide spiders, providing the necessary stiffness to the structure while minimising the obstruction of the beam. The deformable quaternary mirror (M4) contains over 5000 actuators on a nearly hexagonal pattern. The reflective surface of M4 itself is composed of a segmented thin shell made of 6 discontinuous petals. This segmentation of the telescope pupil will create areas of phase isolated by the width of the spiders on the wavefront sensor (WFS) detector, breaking the spatial continuity of the wavefront data.The poor sensitivity of the Pyramid WFS (PWFS) to differential piston (or of any WFS sensitive to the derivative of the wavefront such as the Shack-Hartmann) will lead to badly seen and therefore uncontrollable differential pistons between these areas. In close loop operation, differential pistons between segments will settle around integer values of the average sensing wavelength lambda. The differential pistons typically range from one to tens of time the sensing wavelength and vary rapidly over time, leading to extremely poor performance. In addition, aberrations created by atmospheric turbulence will naturally contain some differential piston between the segments. This differential piston is typically a relatively large multiple of the sensing wavelength, especially for 40 m class telescopes. Trying to directly remove the entire piston contribution over each of the DM segments will undoubtedly lead to poor performance.In an attempt to reduce the impact of unwanted differential pistons that are injected by the AO correction, we compare three different approaches. A first step is to try to limit ourselves to use only the information measured by the PWFS, in particular by reducing the modulation. We show that using this information sensibly is important but it is only a prerequisite and will not be sufficient. We discuss possible ways of improvement by removing the unwanted differential pistons from the DM commands while still trying to maintain the atmospheric segment-piston contribution by using prior information. A second approach is based on phase closure of the DM commands and assumes the continuity of the correction wavefront over the entire unsegmented pupil. The last approach is based on the pair-wise slaving of edge actuators and shows the best results. We compare the performance of these methods using realistic end-to-end simulations. We find that pair-wise slaving leads to a small increase of the total wavefront error, only adding between 20-45 nm RMS in quadrature for seeing conditions between 0.45"-0.85". Finally, we discuss the possibility of combining the different proposed solutions to increase robustness.

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As already noticed in other telescopes, the presence of large telescope spiders and of a segmented deformable mirror in an Adaptive Optics system leads to pupil fragmentation and may create phase discontinuities. On the ELT telescope, a typical effect is the differential piston, where all disconnected areas of the pupil create their own piston, unseen locally but drastically degrading the final image quality. The poor sensitivity of the Pyramid WFS to differential piston will lead to these modes been badly seen and therefore badly controlled by the adaptive optics (AO) loop. In close loop operation, differential pistons between segments will start to appear and settle around integer values of the average sensing wavelength. These additional differential pistons are artificially injected by the adaptive optics control loop but do not have any real physical origin, contrary to the Low Wind Effect. In an attempt to reduce the impact of unwanted differential pistons that are injected by the AO loop, we propose a novel approach based on the pair-wise coupling of the actuators sitting on the edges of the deformable mirror segments. In this paper, we present the correction principle, its performance in nominal seeing condition, and its robustness relative to changing seeing conditions, wind speed and natural guide star magnitude. We show that the edge actuator coupling is a simple and robust solution and that the additional quadratic error relative to the reference case (i.e. no spiders) is of only 40 nm RMS, well within the requirements for HARMONI.

The manufacturing of toric mirrors for the Very Large Telescope-Spectro-Polarimetric High-Contrast Exoplanet Research instrument (SPHERE) is based on Active Optics and stress polishing. This figuring technique allows minimizing mid and high spatial frequency errors on an aspherical surface by using spherical polishing with full size tools. In order to reach the tight precision required, the manufacturing error budget is described to optimize each parameter. Analytical calculations based on elasticity theory and finite element analysis lead to the mechanical design of the Zerodur blank to be warped during the stress polishing phase. Results on the larger (366 mm diameter) toric mirror are evaluated by interferometry. We obtain, as expected, a toric surface within specification at low, middle, and high spatial frequencies ranges.