LANGLOIS , Maud

The Antarctic plateau offers exceptional atmospheric and environmental conditions for astronomical observations over a wide range of wavelengths and uniquely favorable to infrared astronomy. Exceptional low sky brightness throughout the near- and mid-infrared and a telescope facility complying with the highest possible dynamic range for...

Initially designed to detect and characterize exoplanets, extreme adaptive optics systems (AO) open a new window on the solar system by resolving its small bodies. Nonetheless, despite the always increasing performances of AO systems, the correction is not perfect, degrading their image and producing a bright halo that can hide faint and close...

The Evanescent Wave Coronagraph (EvWaCo) is a coronagraph with an occulting mask based on the frustration of total internal reflection to i) produce an achromatic extinction of the central star and ii) reveal the faint companion surrounding the star. Results obtained in laboratory conditions show contrast performance of a few 10-6 between 10...

We present the sharpest and deepest near-infrared photometric analysis of the core of R136, a newly formed massive star cluster at the centre of the 30 Doradus star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. We used the extreme adaptive optics of the SPHERE focal instrument implemented on the ESO Very Large Telescope and operated in its...

The Center for Optics and Photonics of the National Astronomical Research Institute of Thailand, together with the Institut d'Optique Graduate School and the Centre de Recherche Astrohpysique de Lyon (CRAL), is currently developing the Evanescent Wave Coronagraph (EvWaCo). The coronagraph relies on the tunneling effect to produce a fully...

The SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research) planet finder instrument for ESO's VLT telescope, scheduled for first light in 2011, aims to detect giant extra-solar planets in the vicinity of bright stars by the aid of an extreme-AO turbulence compensation system and to characterize the objects found through spectroscopic...

Context. Reference-star differential imaging (RDI) is a promising technique in high-contrast imaging that is thought to be more sensitive to exoplanets and disks than angular differential imaging (ADI) at short angular separations (i.e., <0.3'). However, it is unknown whether the performance of RDI on ground-based instruments can be improved by...

Disentangled cascade adaptive optics for the SPHERE instrument forthcoming upgrade

Recent observations by the B-star Exoplanet Abundance Study (BEAST) illustrate the existence of substellar companions around very massive stars. Here, we present the detection of two lower mass companions to a relatively nearby (148.7 −1.3 +1.5 pc), young (17 −4 +3 Myr), bright ( V = 6.632 ± 0.006 mag), 2.58 ± 0.06 M ⊙ B9V star HIP 81208...

SAXO+ is a planned enhancement of the existing SAXO, the VLT/ SPHERE adaptive optics system, deployed on ESO's Very Large Telescope. This upgrade is designed to significantly enhance the instrument's capacity to detect and analyze young Jupiter-like planets. The pivotal addition in SAXO+ is a second-stage adaptive optics system featuring a...

The evanescent wave coronagraph uses the principle of frustrated total internal reflection (FTIR) to suppress the light coming from the star and study its close environment. Its focal plane mask is composed of a lens and a prism placed in contact with each other to produce the coronagraphic effect. In this paper, we present the experimental...