Optical gains measurement with a gain scheduling camera: On-sky demonstration with PAPYRUS and perspectives

¹ DOTA, ONERA, 13330, Salon-de-Provence, France
² Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, IPAG, 38000 Grenoble, France
³ Aix Marseille University, CNRS, CNES, LAM, Marseille, France
⁴ Ifremer, RDT Research and Technological Development, Plouzané, France
⁵ DOTA, ONERA, Université Paris Saclay, 91120 Palaiseau, France

^★ Corresponding author: arnaud.striffling@lam.fr

Received: 12 June 2025
Accepted: 24 September 2025

Abstract

Context. Reaching the high angular resolution and contrast level desired for exoplanetary science requires us to equip large telescopes with extreme adaptive optics (XAO) systems to compensate for the effect of the atmospheric turbulence at a very fast rate. This calls for the development of ultra-sensitive wavefront sensors (WFSs), such as Fourier filtering wavefront sensors (FFWFSs), to be operated at low flux, as well as an increase in the XAO loop frame rate. These sensors, which constitute the baseline for current and future XAO systems, exhibit such a high sensitivity at the expense of a non-linear behaviour that must be properly calibrated and compensated for to deliver the required performance.

Aims. We aim to validate on-sky a recently proposed method that associates the FFWFS with a focal plane detector - the gain scheduling camera (GSC) - to estimate in real time the first-order terms of the sensor non-linearities, known as modal optical gains.

Methods. We implemented a GSC on the adaptive-optics (AO) bench PAPYRUS to be associated with the existing pyramid wavefront sensor (PWFS). We compared experimental results to expected results obtained with a high-fidelity numerical twin of the AO system.

Results. We validated experimentally the method both in laboratory and on-sky. We demonstrated the capability of the GSC to accurately estimate the optical gains of the PWFS at 100 Hz, corresponding to the current limit in speed imposed by PAPYRUS hardware, but it could be applied at higher frequencies to enable frame-by-frame optical gains tracking. The presented results exhibit good agreement on the optical gains estimation with respect to numerical simulations reproducing the experimental conditions tested.

Conclusions. Our experimental results validate the strategy of coupling a FFWFS with a focal-plane camera to master the nonlinearities of the sensor. This demonstrates its attractiveness for future XAO application.