Kavli Affiliate: Bruce Macintosh
| First 5 Authors: Clarissa R. Do Ó, Saavidra Perera, Jérôme Maire, Jayke S. Nguyen, Vincent Chambouleyron
| Summary:
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is a high contrast imaging instrument that
aims to detect and characterize extrasolar planets. GPI is being upgraded to
GPI 2.0, with several subsystems receiving a re-design to improve its contrast.
To enable observations on fainter targets and increase performance on brighter
ones, one of the upgrades is to the adaptive optics system. The current
Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (WFS) is being replaced by a pyramid WFS with
an low-noise electron multiplying CCD (EMCCD). EMCCDs are detectors capable of
counting single photon events at high speed and high sensitivity. In this work,
we characterize the performance of the HN"u 240 EMCCD from N"uv"u Cameras,
which was custom-built for GPI 2.0. Through our performance evaluation we found
that the operating mode of the camera had to be changed from inverted-mode
(IMO) to non-inverted mode (NIMO) in order to improve charge diffusion features
found in the detector’s images. Here, we characterize the EMCCD’s noise
contributors (readout noise, clock-induced charges, dark current) and linearity
tests (EM gain, exposure time) before and after the switch to NIMO.
| Search Query: ArXiv Query: search_query=au:”Bruce Macintosh”&id_list=&start=0&max_results=3