Direct Imaging
My Honours and Masters research was on kernel-phase interferometry, working with Peter Tuthill (Sydney) and Frantz Martinache (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur). This is a generalization of the idea of non-redundant aperture masking, which constructs self-calibrating, closure-phase like quantities from redundant apertures. Using this, we are able to achieve high angular resolution, high-contrast detection of faint companions from ground-based AO and space telescope data, and also for wavefront sensing.
I have long been interested in whether this idea has more general extensions, proposing kernel amplitudes, and using automatic differentiation to show that coronagraphs possess a kernel too.
Automatic differentiation software developed for neural networks turns out to be very well suited to optics, and with recently-submitted PhD Alison Wong we have shown it can be used for phase retrieval and hardware design - coronagraphs, astrometric pupils, you name it!
I have recently been working with PhD student Louis Desdoigts on dLux, a GPU-accelerated and automatically-differentiable physical optics code built on Jax and equinox. We're looking forward to the first official release, and the first papers built on dLux!
