Demonstrating Improved Contrast on the Roman Coronagraph with Spatial Linear Dark Field Control

Abstract: The baseline contrast floor from the Roman Coronagraph's High-Order Wavefront Sensing and Control strategy likely degrades over the course of time, requiring periodic recalibration of the dark hole. Here, we propose to consider spatial linear dark field control (sLDFC) on a one-sided deep-contrast region of the focal plane as a potential test. Implementing sLDFC on CGI will likely require some unique data acquisition strategies given the EMCCD's high flux sensitivity in long exposures/high gain: we outline three possible approaches. However, if successful, sLDFC's advances are substantial: (1) enabling us to maintain a fainter, more temporally correlated dark hole which will improve CGI's contrast after post-processing and (2) efficiently providing a reliable signal (bright field) for accurate reconstruction of residual starlight in the dark field, further boosting CGI's detection limit for bright targets.