Friday, September 26, 2025 at 12:15 pm

JILA Foothills Room

Skyler Palatnick , UC Santa Barbara

" 4 years in metasurface development for exoplanet imaging at UC Santa Barbara "

Abstract:

As exoplanet direct imaging progresses towards lower planet-star contrasts and smaller, less separated planets, the need for technological improvement in imaging systems remains ever present. Metasurface optics, or arrays of subwavelength structures with highly tailorable geometry and composition on a thin substrate, have the potential to greatly advance coronagraph systems at various stages of the optical pipeline by correcting aberrations induced by other optical components and improving upon the performance of the conventional optics that are currently used. Metasurfaces can provide achromatic phase, amplitude, and/or polarization control in a compact package. They can also be designed to apply different manipulations to different polarization states of light, performing multiple optical functions simultaneously and independently. I will provide a brief overview of metasurface optics and discuss my efforts to design, fabricate, characterize metasurface coronagraphic masks, and (hopefully soon!) install these optics in ground-based instruments. 

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